Abstract
BACKGROUND: Recent studies have confirmed that immune-associated genes perform a crucial function in recurrence and metastasis of thyroid carcinoma. A reliable immune-related prognostic signature for patients with thyroid cancer is needed. This study constructed a novel immune-related prognostic signature for thyroid cancer and evaluated its prognostic value by bioinformatics analysis. METHODS: In this study, we anatomized differentially expressed immune-associated genes from The Cancer Genome Atlas database. The samples from The Cancer Genome Atlas database were randomly divided into training set and test set. A novel immune-related prognostic signature for thyroid cancer was developed by least absolute shrinkage and selection operator and Cox regression analysis: Risk score = (0.6846 × expression value of C-X-C motif chemokine ligand 5 [CXCL5]) + (1.1556 × expression value of Azurocidin 1 [AZU1]) + (-0.3156 × expression value of nucleotide binding oligomerization domain containing 1 [NOD1] + (0.0542 × expression value of TNF Receptor Superfamily Member 11b [TNFRSF11B]) + (0.0952 × expression value of VGF nerve growth factor inducible [VGF]). The established prognostic signature was evaluated based on training set and test set by survival curves, receiver-operator characteristic curves, risk score, survival status, heatmap, and independent prognostic analysis. Meanwhile, we appraised the correlation between target immune-associated genes and clinical stage, tumor-infiltrating immune cells respectively. RESULTS: Five immune-associated genes were used for constructing an immune-related prognostic signature by least absolute shrinkage and selection operator, univariate, and multivariate analysis. Survival curves, receiver-operator characteristic curves, and independent prognostic analysis showed the signature had significant prediction value. Clinical and immune cell correlation analyses indicated that target immune-associated genes may participate in tumor immune infiltration and tumor progression. CONCLUSIONS: We constructed a novel 5 immune-associated genes signature for predicting the prognosis of patients with thyroid cancer, which may help clinical workers evaluate individualized therapy and prognosis.