Background: Breast cancer (BC) is a heterogeneous malignant tumor, leading to the second major cause of female mortality. This study aimed to establish an in-depth relationship between ferroptosis-related LncRNA (FRlncRNA) and the prognosis as well as immune microenvironment of the patients with BC. Methods: We downloaded and integrated the gene expression data and the clinical information of the patients with BC from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database. The co-expression network analysis and univariate Cox regression analysis were performed to screen out the FRlncRNAs related to prognosis. A cluster analysis was adopted to explore the difference of immune microenvironment between the clusters. Furthermore, we determined the optimal survival-related FRLncRNAs for final signature by LASSO Cox regression analysis. Afterward, we constructed and validated the prediction models, which were further tested in different subgroups. Results: A total of 31 FRLncRNAs were filtrated as prognostic biomarkers. Two clusters were determined, and C1 showed better prognosis and higher infiltration level of immune cells, such as B cells naive, plasma cells, T cells CD8, and T cells CD4 memory activated. However, there were no significantly different clinical characters between the clusters. Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (GSEA) revealed that some metabolism-related pathways and immune-associated pathways were exposed. In addition, 12 FRLncRNAs were determined by LASSO analysis and used to construct a prognostic signature. In both the training and testing sets, patients in the high-risk group had a worse survival than the low-risk patients. The area under the curves (AUCs) of receiver operator characteristic (ROC) curves were about 0.700, showing positive prognostic capacity. More notably, through the comprehensive analysis of heatmap, we regarded LINC01871, LINC02384, LIPE-AS1, and HSD11B1-AS1 as protective LncRNAs, while LINC00393, AC121247.2, AC010655.2, LINC01419, PTPRD-AS1, AC099329.2, OTUD6B-AS1, and LINC02266 were classified as risk LncRNAs. At the same time, the patients in the low-risk groups were more likely to be assigned to C1 and had a higher immune score, which were consistent with a better prognosis. Conclusion: Our research indicated that the ferroptosis-related prognostic signature could be used as novel biomarkers for predicting the prognosis of BC. The differences in the immune microenvironment exhibited by BC patients with different risks and clusters suggested that there may be a complementary synergistic effect between ferroptosis and immunotherapy.
Keywords: breast cancer; ferroptosis; immune microenvironment; lncRNA; prognosis.
Copyright © 2021 Xu, Jiang, Ma, Tang, Yan and Fang.