A Novel 10-genes Ferroptosis-Related Prognostic Signature in Acute Myeloid Leukemia

Abstract Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is one of the most common hematopoietic malignancies and exhibits a high rate of relapse and unfavorable outcomes. Ferroptosis, a relatively recently described type of cell death, has been reported to be involved in cancer development. However, the prognostic value of ferroptosis-related genes (FRGs) in AML remains unclear. In this study, we found 54 differentially expressed ferroptosis-related genes (DEFRGs) between AML and normal marrow tissues. Eighteen of these 54 DEFRGs were correlated with overall survival (OS) (P <0.05). Using the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) Cox regression analysis, we selected 10 DEFRGs that were associated with OS to build a prognostic signature. Data from AML patients from the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) cohort were used for validation. Notably, the prognostic survival analyses of this signature passed with a significant margin, and the risk score was identified as an independent prognostic marker using Cox regression analyses. Further studies showed that AML was significantly associated with immune cell infiltration. In addition, drug-sensitive analysis showed that 8 drugs may be beneficial for treatment of AML and we used our own data (FAHWMU cohort) as a clinical validation. In conclusion, our study establishes a novel 10-gene prognostic risk signature based on ferroptosis related genes for AML patients and additionally we provide evidence that FRGs may be novel therapeutic targets for AML.