A novel autophagy-related long non-coding RNAs signature predicting progression-free interval and I-131 therapy benefits in papillary thyroid carcinoma

Abstract

This study aimed to explore the prognostic and predictive value of autophagy-related lncRNAs in papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC). The expression data of autophagy-related genes and lncRNAs of the PTC patients were obtained from TCGA database. Autophagy-related-differentially expressed lncRNAs (DElncs) were identified and used to establish the lncRNAs signature predicting patients’ progression-free interval (PFI) in the training cohort. Its performance was assessed in the training cohort, validation cohort, and entire cohort. Effects of the signature on I-131 therapy were also explored. We identified 199 autophagy-related-DElncs and constructed a novel six-lncRNAs signature was constructed based on these lncRNAs. This signature had a good predictive performance and was superior to TNM stages and previous clinical risk scores. I-131 therapy was found to be associated with favorable prognosis in patients with high-risk scores but not those with low-risk scores. Gene set enrichment analysis suggested that a series of hallmark gene sets were enriched in the high-risk subgroup. Single-cell RNA sequencing analysis suggested that the lncRNAs were mainly expressed in thyroid cells but not stromal cells. In conclusion, our study constructed a well-performed six-lncRNAs signature to predict PFI and I-131 therapy benefits in PTC.

Exploring the advances of single-cell RNA sequencing in thyroid cancer: a narrative review

“…Another model uses six long non-coding RNAs (lncRNA) within thyroid cells at distinct stages of tumour progression. This long non-coding RNA signature has shown potential for prognosticating progression-free intervals and assessing the efficacy of RAI (I-131) therapy in PTC [35]. Such successful prediction models of therapeutic efficacy can enhance personalised medicine approaches and optimise healthcare resources by minimising expenditure on ineffective therapies.…”

“…The current findings from thyroid cancer cell scRNAseq require validation through further in vivo and in vitro experimentation [20,21,29,35]. In addition, future studies would be improved by functional validation of scRNA-seq findings, including iodine uptake and retention in various types of thyrocytes and the roles of identified TDS-associated genes in PTC tumorigenesis [20].…”

“…Lastly, inherent biases associated with the processing of scRNA samples, such as batch effects Fig. 7 Future directions in single-cell rna-seq for thyroid cancer research (Image originally created by authors) [1,20,21,26,29,35,45,48,60,61]. scRNA-seq single-cell ribonucleic acid sequencing, RNA ribonucleic acid [42], could distort interpretation and lead to inaccurate conclusions.…”