Research Paper Volume 13, Issue 21 pp 24251—24270
A prognostic fibroblast-related risk signature in colorectal cancer
- 1 Division of General Surgery, Peking University First Hospital, Peking University, Beijing 100034, People’s Republic of China
- 2 Translational Cancer Research Center, Peking University First Hospital, Peking University, Beijing 100034, People’s Republic of China
Received: July 1, 2021 Accepted: October 26, 2021 Published: November 4, 2021
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.203677How to Cite
Copyright: © 2021 Xu and Pan. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the third most common cancer in the world. The accessibility of the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and Gene Expression Omnibus data allows the prognostic evaluation of CRC. Fibroblasts play a key role in the development and progression of tumors while fibroblast-related risk signature in CRC patients has rarely been mentioned. In this study, TCGA data was classified into high-fibroblast and low-fibroblast groups according to the median of fibroblast content. Among 3845 differentially expressed genes between two groups, 14 prognostic genes commonly expressed in GSE39582 and TCGA were identified by LASSO-COX analysis. Then we established a fibroblast-related risk signature in TCGA training group and validated in the GSE39582 testing group. The risk score was significantly associated with the overall survival (OS), and the poor prognosis of patients in high-risk group might relate to the immune cell infiltration in the tumor microenvironment, epithelial-mesenchymal transition, and extracellular matrix related processes. Overall, we proved that the fibroblast-related signature could predict the prognosis of patients which might shed light on the treatment of CRC.