Construction of an Immune-Related lncRNA Signature That Predicts Prognosis and Immune Microenvironment in Osteosarcoma Patients

Abstract

Osteosarcoma is one of the most common bone tumors in teenagers. We hope to provide a reliable method to predict the prognosis of osteosarcoma and find potential targets for early diagnosis and precise treatment. To address this issue, we performed a detailed bioinformatics analysis based on the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). A total of 85 osteosarcoma patients with gene expression data and clinicopathological features were included in this study, which was considered the entire set. They were randomly divided into a train set and a test set. We identified six lncRNAs (ELFN1-AS1, LINC00837, OLMALINC, AL669970.3, AC005332.4 and AC023157.3), and constructed a signature that exhibited good predictive ability of patient survival and metastasis. What’s more, we found that risk score calculated by the signature was positively correlated to tumor purity, CD4+ naive T cells, and negatively correlated to CD8+ T cells. Furthermore, we investigated each lncRNA in the signature and found that these six lncRNAs were associated with tumorigenesis and immune cells in the tumor microenvironment. In conclusion, we constructed and validated a signature, which had good performance in the prediction of survival, metastasis and immune microenvironment. Our study indicated possible mechanisms of these lncRNAs in the development of osteosarcoma, which may provide new insights into the precise treatment of osteosarcoma.