A Novel Prognostic Model In Oral Squamous Carcinoma: The Functions And Prognostic Values Of Rna Binding Proteins

Abstract

Background: The biological roles and clinical significance of RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) in oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) are not fully understood. We investigated the prognostic value of RBPs in OSCC by several bioinformatic strategies.Methods: OSCC data were obtained from a public online database, the Limma R package was used to identify differentially expressed RBPs, and functional enrichment analysis was performed to elucidate the biological functions of the above RBPs in OSCC. We performed protein-protein interaction (PPI) network and Cox regression analyses to extract prognosis-related hub RBPs. Next, we established and validated a prognostic model based on the hub RBPs by Cox regression and risk score analyses.Results: We found that the differentially expressed RBPs were closely related to the defence response to virus and multiple RNA processes. We obtained ten prognosis-related hub RBPs (ZC3H12D, OAS2, INTS10, ACO1, PCBP4, RNASE3, PTGES3L-AARSD1, RNASE13, DDX4, and PCF11) and effectively predicted the overall survival of OSCC patients. The area under the ROC curve (AUC) of the risk score model was 0.781, suggesting that our model had good prognostic performance. Finally, we built a nomogram integrating the ten RBPs. The internal validation cohort results showed a reliable predictive capability of the nomogram for OSCC.Conclusions: We established a novel ten-RBP-based model for OSCC that could enable precise therapeutic targets in the future.