A thirty-three gene-based signature predicts lymph node metastasis and prognosis in patients with gastric cancer

• Published in: Heliyon 2023-06, Vol.9 (6), p.e17017-e17017, Article e17017
• Main Authors: Xiao, Jian, Wang, Gang, Zhu, Chuming, Liu, Kanghui, Wang, Yuanhang, Shen, Kuan, Fan, Hao, Ma, Xiang, Xu, Zekuan, Yang, Li
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Gastric cancer; Gene signature; Lymph node metastasis; Prognosis
• ISSN: 2405-8440; 2405-8440
• DOI: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e17017

Recently, several studies have indicated the great potential of gene expression signature of the primary tumor in predicting lymph node metastasis; however, few current gene biomarkers can predict lymph node status and prognosis in gastric cancer (GC). Thus, we used the RNA-seq data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) to identify differentially expressed genes between pathological lymph node-negative (pN0) and positive (pN+) patients and to establish a gene signature that could predict lymph node metastasis. Meanwhile, the robustness of identified gene signatures was validated in an independent dataset Asian Cancer Research Group (n = 300). In this study, our thirty-three gene-based signature was highly correlated with lymph node metastasis and could successfully discriminate pN + patients in the training set (Area under the receiver operating characteristic curve = 0.951). Moreover, Disease-free survival (P = 0.0029) and overall survival (P = 0.026) were significantly worse in high-risk compared with low-risk patients overall and when confined to pN0 patients only (P