A five-long non-coding RNA signature to improve prognosis prediction of clear cell renal cell carcinoma

Recent works have reported that long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) play critical roles in tumorigenesis and prognosis of cancers, suggesting the potential utility of lncRNAs as cancer prognostic markers. However, lncRNA signatures in predicting the survival of patients with clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) remain unknown. In this study, we attempted to identify lncRNA signatures and their prognostic values in ccRCC. Using lncRNA expression profiling data in 440 ccRCC tumors from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) data, a five-lncRNA signature ( , , , , ) has been identified to be significantly associated with ccRCC patients' overall survival in both training set and testing set. Based on the lncRNA signature, ccRCC patients could be divided into high-risk and low-risk group with significantly different survival rate. Further multivariable Cox regression analysis suggested that the prognostic value of this signature was independent of clinical factors. Functional enrichment analyses showed the potential functional roles of the five prognostic lncRNAs in ccRCC oncogenesis. These results indicated that this five-lncRNA signature could be used as an independent prognostic biomarker in the prediction of ccRCC patients' survival.