A Prognostic Model Based on mRNA Expression Analysis of Esophageal Squamous Cell Carcinoma

Ke Liu; Ye-Lin Jiao; Liu-Qing Shen; Pan Chen; Ying Zhao; Meng-Xiang Li; Bian-Li Gu; Zi-Jun Lan; Hao-Jie Ruan; Qi-Wei Liu; Feng-Bo Xu; Xiang Yuan; Yi-Jun Qi; She-Gan Gao

doi:10.3389/fbioe.2022.823619

A Prognostic Model Based on mRNA Expression Analysis of Esophageal Squamous Cell Carcinoma

Front Bioeng Biotechnol. 2022 Mar 1:10:823619. doi: 10.3389/fbioe.2022.823619. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Ke Liu^{1

2}, Ye-Lin Jiao³, Liu-Qing Shen², Pan Chen², Ying Zhao², Meng-Xiang Li^{1

2}, Bian-Li Gu², Zi-Jun Lan², Hao-Jie Ruan¹, Qi-Wei Liu², Feng-Bo Xu², Xiang Yuan², Yi-Jun Qi², She-Gan Gao^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ School of Information Engineering, Henan University of Science and Technology, Luoyang, China.
² Henan Key Laboratory of Microbiome and Esophageal Cancer Prevention and Treatment, Henan Key Laboratory of Cancer Epigenetics, Cancer Hospital, The First Affiliated Hospital (College of Clinical Medicine) of Henan University of Science and Technology, Luoyang, China.
³ Department of Pathology, Luo Yang First Peoples's Hospital, Luoyang, China.

Abstract

Background: The aim of this study was to identify prognostic markers for esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) and build an effective prognostic nomogram for ESCC. Methods: A total of 365 patients with ESCC from three medical centers were divided into four cohorts. In the discovery phase of the study, we analyzed transcriptional data from 179 cancer tissue samples and identified nine marker genes using edgeR and rbsurv packages. In the training phase, penalized Cox regression was used to select the best marker genes and clinical characteristics in the 179 samples. In the verification phase, these marker genes and clinical characteristics were verified by internal validation cohort (n = 58) and two external cohorts (n = 81, n = 105). Results: We constructed and verified a nomogram model based on multiple clinicopathologic characteristics and gene expression of a patient cohort undergoing esophagectomy and adjuvant radiochemotherapy. The predictive accuracy for 4-year overall survival (OS) indicated by the C-index was 0.75 (95% CI, 0.72-0.78), which was statistically significantly higher than that of the American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) seventh edition (0.65). Furthermore, we found two marker genes (TM9SF1, PDZK1IP) directly related to the OS of esophageal cancer. Conclusion: The nomogram presented in this study can accurately and impersonally predict the prognosis of ESCC patients after partial resection of the esophagus. More research is required to determine whether it can be applied to other patient populations. Moreover, we found two marker genes directly related to the prognosis of ESCC, which will provide a basis for future research.

Keywords: dimensionality reduction (DR); esophageal squamous cell carcinoma; marker gene; nomogram; prognosis.