Identifying Potential Prognostic Expression Quantitative Trait Methylation for Predicting Survival in Osteosarcoma

Background: Osteosarcoma (OS) is a complex cancer and depends on multiple biological processes and pathways. Therefore, there is an urgent need to identify reliable prognostic biomarkers for predicting clinical outcomes and helping personalize treatment of OS. Results: : An expression Quantitative Trait Methylations (eQTMs)-based risk score model was developed to infer the prognostic efficacy for OS based on gene expression and methylation level. Some OS-specific eQTMs were identified and divided to positive and negative eQTMs. We found that some OS-specific eQTMs were significantly associated with survival in OS according to the eQTM-based risk score. The global characteristics for these prognosis-associated eQTMS were depicted and analyzed. These prognosis-associated eQTMS are stable in multiple experiments and showed better performance in predicting survival than single gene expression, age and gender of OS. Functional analysis indicated that the genes in prognosis-associated eQTMS were associated with essential biology processes of cancer development. In addition, these genes were also drug targets for many kinds of drugs and may provide assistance for studying drug repurposing of OS. Conclusion: These results highlight the potential of eQTMs as novel diagnostic, prognostic and therapeutic targets for OS.