A four-long non-coding RNA signature in predicting breast cancer survival

Background: many long non-coding rnas(lncrnas) have been found to be a good marker for several tumors. using lncrna-mining approach,we aimed to identify lncrna expression signature that can predict breast cancer patient survival. methods: we performed lncrna expression profiling in 887 breast cancer patients from gene expression omnibus (geo) datasets. the association between lncrna signature and clinical survival was analyzed using the training set(n = 327,from gse 20685). the validation for the association was performed in another three independent testing sets(252 from gse21653,204 from gse12276,and 104 from gse42568). results: a set of four lncrna genes (u79277,ak024118,bc040204,ak000974) have been identified by the random survival forest algorithm. using a risk score based on the expression signature of these lncrnas,we separated the patients into low-risk and high-risk groups with significantly different survival times in the training set. this signature was validated in the other three cohorts. further study revealed that the four-lncrna expression signature was independent of age and subtype. gene set enrichment analysis (gsea) suggested that gene sets were involved in several cancer metastasis related pathways. conclusions: these findings indicate that lncrnas may be implicated in breast cancer pathogenesis. the four-lncrna signature may have clinical implications in the selection of high-risk patients for adjuvant therapy. © 2014 meng et al.