Survival associated miRNA signature in patients with head and neck carcinomas

Srinivasulu Yerukala Sathipati; Shinn-Ying Ho

doi:10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e17218

Survival associated miRNA signature in patients with head and neck carcinomas

Heliyon. 2023 Jun 12;9(6):e17218. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e17218. eCollection 2023 Jun.

Authors

Srinivasulu Yerukala Sathipati¹, Shinn-Ying Ho^{2

3

4

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Affiliations

¹ Center for Precision Medicine Research, Marshfield Clinic Research Institute, Marshfield, WI, 54449, USA.
² Institute of Bioinformatics and Systems Biology, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan.
³ Department of Biological Science and Technology, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan.
⁴ College of Health Sciences, Kaohsiung Medical University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan.
⁵ Center for Intelligent Drug Systems and Smart Bio-devices (IDSB), National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan.

Abstract

Head and neck carcinoma (HNSC) is often diagnosed at advanced stage, incurring poor patient outcome. Despite of advances in chemoradiation and surgery approaches, limited improvements in survival rates of HNSC have been observed over the last decade. Accumulating evidences have demonstrated the importance of microRNAs (miRNAs) in carcinogenesis. In this context, we sought to identify a miRNA signature associated with the survival time in patients with HNSC. This study proposed a survival estimation method called HNSC-Sig that identified a miRNA signature consists of 25 miRNAs associated with the survival in 133 patients with HNSC. HNSC-Sig achieved 10-fold cross validation a mean correlation coefficient and a mean absolute error of 0.85 ± 0.01 and 0.46 ± 0.02 years, respectively, between actual and estimated survival times. The survival analysis revealed that five miRNAs, hsa-miR-3605-3p, hsa-miR-629-3p, hsa-miR-3127-5p, hsa-miR-497-5p, and hsa-miR-374a-5p, were significantly associated with prognosis in patients with HNSC. Comparing the relative expression difference of top 10 prioritized miRNAs, eight miRNAs, hsa-miR-629-3p, hsa-miR-3127-5p, hsa-miR-221-3p, hsa-miR-501-5p, hsa-miR-491-5p, hsa-miR-149-3p, hsa-miR-3934-5p, and hsa-miR-3170, were significantly expressed between cancer and normal groups. In addition, biological relevance, disease association, and target interactions of the miRNA signature were discussed. Our results suggest that identified miRNA signature have potential to serve as biomarker for diagnosis and clinical practice in HNSC.

Keywords: Cancer survival; Head and neck cancer; Machine learning; miRNA signature.