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Cuproptosis-related lncRNAs predict the prognosis and immune response in hepatocellular carcinoma

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Abstract

Cuproptosis has been recently used to indicate unique biological processes triggered by Cu action as a new term. This study aimed to explore the relationship between cuproptosis-related lncRNA and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) with regard to immunity and prognosis. RNA sequencing and the clinical data were downloaded from the TCGA database. The cuproptosis-related genes were sorted out through literature study. The cuproptosis-related IncRNA signature was identified by Cox regression analysis and the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator analysis. The K-M survival analysis, receiver operating characteristic analysis, and C-index analysis were adopted to evaluate the prognostic prediction performance of the signature. The functional enrichment, immune infiltration and tumor mutation analysis were further analyzed. Subsequently, we predicted the differences in chemosensitivity from tumor gene expression levels for some chemotherapy drugs. The prognostic signature consisting of 5 overall survival-related CUPlncRNAs. It showed an extraordinary ability to predict the prognoses of patients with HCC. The signature can predict the abundance of immune cell infiltration, immune functions, expression of immune checkpoint inhibitors, m6A genes, which was supported by the GO biological process and KEGG analysis. And it may also have a guiding effect in the sensitivity of different chemotherapeutic drugs and tumor mutation burden. We constructed a new cuproptosis-related lncRNA signature for HCC patients. The model can be used for prognostic prediction and immune evaluation, providing a reference for immunotherapies and targeted therapies.

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Publicly available datasets were analyzed in this study. All datasets presented in this.

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Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge contributions from the TCGA network and the reviewers for their helpful comments on this study.

Funding

This study was supported by National Science and Technology Major Project of China (2017ZX10203201002-002).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Infectious Diseases, The First Affiliated Hospital of Soochow University, Suzhou, 215006, Jiangsu, People’s Republic of China

    Qiongyue Zhang, Yan Huang, Yumeng Liu & Jianhe Gan

  2. Department of Orthopaedics, The First Affiliated Hospital of Soochow University, Suzhou, 215006, China

    Yu Xia

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Contributions

GJH and ZQY contributed to study conception and design and drafting of manuscript; ZQY and HY were involved in acquisition of data; ZQY, HY, XY and LYM contributed to analysis and interpretation of data; ZQY, HY, XY, LYM and GJH contributed to the writing, review, revision of the manuscript. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

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Correspondence to Jianhe Gan.

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We performed this research though publicly available datasets. There was no ethical approval was required.

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Zhang, Q., Huang, Y., Xia, Y. et al. Cuproptosis-related lncRNAs predict the prognosis and immune response in hepatocellular carcinoma. Clin Exp Med 23, 2051–2064 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10238-022-00892-3

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