A Unique Gene Signature Predictive of Survival in Patients With Lung Adenocarcinoma

Abstract

Lung cancer continues to be responsible for a major proportion of cancer-related morbidity and mortality worldwide. Adenocarcinoma is known to be the predominant histologic type in patients with lung cancer. There is a need to develop unique prognostic indicators in lung adenocarcinoma as this would help clinicians to identify patients who will benefit the most from aggressive treatments and prevent unnecessary treatment-related toxicity in those who will not benefit as much. METHODS:The human gene list was downloaded from Ensembl genes 99 database using Human genes (GRCh38.p13 dataset). The cancer genome atlas database has genomic characterization of 2167 cases of Lung Adenocarcinoma from 6 different studies. We combined all the datasets and analyzed the mutational profile of each individual genes in 62358 gene set and determined whether each gene in our dataset is altered in the Lung Adenocarcinomas, number of cases in which the gene is altered, whether alteration is associated with increased or decreased survival and median overall survival associated with the alteration using cbioportal.org. http://www.cbioportal.org/ is a web-based platform designed by Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centers Computational Biology Center. We reviewed a set of 25,460 genes in which the survival was altered. Out of 25,460 genes, we identified a unique 15 gene signature, alterations in at least one of which were found to be of prognostic value in these patients. Data was statistically analyzed, validated and Kaplan-Meir curves were constructed to demonstrate differences in outcomes between patients with alteration in at least 1 gene from the signature and those without any alterations.