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Clinical Significance and Immune Infiltration Analyses of a Novel Nerve-Related lncRNA Signature in Gastric Cancer

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Abstract

Gastric cancer (GC) is a progressive disease with high morbidity and mortality. Accumulating evidence indicated that nervous system-cancer crosstalk can affect the occurrence and progression of GC. However, the role of nerve-related lncRNAs (NRLs) in GC remains largely unexplored. In this study, a total of 441 nerve-related genes were collected from the KEGG database, and two approaches, unsupervised clustering and WGCNA, were employed to identify NRLs. Lasso regression analysis was then used to construct the nerve-related lncRNA signature (NRLS). Based on the expression profiles of 5 lncRNAs, we developed a stable NRLS to predict survival in GC patients, and survival analyses showed significantly shorter overall survival (OS) in patients with high NRLS. In addition, the NRLS was found to be positively correlated with immune characteristics, including tumor-infiltrating immune cells, immune modulators, cytokines and chemokines. We then analyzed the role of NRLS in predicting chemotherapy and immunotherapy responses, and constructed the OS nomogram combining NRLS and other clinical features. In conclusion, we constructed a robust NRLS model to stratify GC patients and predict the outcomes of chemotherapy and immunotherapy. This study can provide a new perspective for future individualized treatment of GC.

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Data Availability

The public data and corresponding clinical information can be found in the TCGA (https://portal.gdc.cancer.gov/), UCSC Xena (https://xenabrowser.net/), and GEO (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/) database. The nerve-related genes are available at the KEGG database (https://www.kegg.jp/).

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The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and publication for this article.

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Author notes

  1. Lupeng Qiu and Yaru Liu have contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Medical School of Chinese PLA, No. 28 Fuxing Road, Haidian District, Beijing, 100853, China

    Lupeng Qiu

  2. Department of Medical Oncology, The First Medical Centre, Chinese PLA General Hospital, No. 28 Fuxing Road, Haidian District, Beijing, 100853, China

    Lupeng Qiu, Zizhong Yang, Xiao Zhao & Shunchang Jiao

  3. Research and Development Department, Beijing DCTY Biotech Co., Ltd., No.86 Shuangying West Road, Changping District, Beijing, 102299, China

    Lupeng Qiu, Yaru Liu & Yixin Gong

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  1. Lupeng Qiu
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Contributions

LQ and SJ participated in study design and drafted the manuscript. LQ and YL performed the data curation and analysis. ZY and XZ contributed to visualization. YG contributed for overall editing and supervision. All authors reviewed the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Yixin Gong or Shunchang Jiao.

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Qiu, L., Liu, Y., Yang, Z. et al. Clinical Significance and Immune Infiltration Analyses of a Novel Nerve-Related lncRNA Signature in Gastric Cancer. Mol Biotechnol (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12033-023-00997-4

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