A Prognostic Ferroptosis-Related lncRNA Model Associated With Immune Infiltration in Colon Cancer

Abstract

Colon cancer (CC) is a common malignant tumor worldwide, and ferroptosis plays a vital role in the pathology and progression of CC. Effective prognostic tools are required to guide clinical decision-making in CC. In our study, gene expression and clinical data of CC were downloaded from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) databases. We identified the differentially expressed ferroptosis-related lncRNAs using the differential expression and gene co-expression analysis. Then, univariate and multivariate Cox regression analyses were used to identify the effective ferroptosis-related lncRNAs for constructing the prognostic model for CC. Gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) was conducted to explore the functional enrichment analysis. CIBERSORT and single-sample GSEA were performed to investigate the association between our model and the immune microenvironment. Finally, three ferroptosis-related lncRNAs (XXbac-B476C20.9, TP73-AS1, and SNHG15) were identified to construct the prognostic model. The results of the validation showed that our model was effective in predicting the prognosis of CC patients, which also was an independent prognostic factor for CC. The GSEA analysis showed that several ferroptosis-related pathways were significantly enriched in the low-risk group. Immune infiltration analysis suggested that the level of immune cell infiltration was significantly higher in the high-risk group than that in the low-risk group. In summary, we established a prognostic model based on the ferroptosis-related lncRNAs, which could provide clinical guidance for future laboratory and clinical research on CC.