Identification of an autophagy-related gene signature for survival prediction in patients with cervical cancer

Abstract Autophagy controls the survival and death of cancerous cells by regulating the degradation process of cytoplasm and cellular organelle. In the present study, the differentially expressed autophagy-related genes (ARGs) between healthy and cancerous cervical tissues (squamous cell neoplasms) were obtained using data from GTEx and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database. The functionalities of the differentially expressed ARGs were analyzed using GO and KEGG database. After univariate and multivariate cox regression assay, we got a six ARG-related prognostic signature for the survival prediction of patients with squamous cell cervical cancer (Risk score= -0.63*ATG3-0.42*BCL2+0.85*CD46-0.38*IFNG+0.23*NAMPT+0.82*TM9SF1). Kaplan-Meier curve demonstrated that patients with a high-risk score tend to have a poor prognosis (P<0.001). The value for area under the curves corresponding to the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) was 0.740. As observed, the expression of IFNG was negatively associated with lymph node metastasis (P=0.026), while a high-risk score was significantly associated with increased age (P=0.008). To further validate the prognostic signature, we carried out a permutation test and confirmed the performance of the risk score.