Identification of a Twelve Epithelial-Mesenchymal Transition-Related lncRNA Prognostic Signature in Kidney Clear Cell Carcinoma

Background. Epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) plays a vital role in tumor metastasis and drug resistance. It has been reported that EMT is regulated by several long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs). We aimed to identify EMT-related lncRNAs and develop an EMT-related lncRNA prognostic signature in kidney renal clear cell carcinoma (KIRC). Materials and Methods. In total, 530 ccRCC patients with 611 transcriptome profiles were included in this study. We first identified differentially expressed EMT-related lncRNAs. Then, all the samples with transcriptional data and clinical survival information were randomly split into training/test sets at a ratio of 1:1. Accordingly, we further developed a twelve differentially expressed EMT-related lncRNA prognostic signature in the training set. Following this, risk analysis, survival analysis, subgroup analysis, and the construction of the ROC curves were applied to verify the efficacy of the signature in the training set, test set, and all patients. Besides, we further investigated the differential immune infiltration, immune checkpoint expression, and immune-related functions between high-risk patients. Finally, we explored the different drug responses to targeted therapy (sunitinib and sorafenib) and immunotherapy (anti-PD1 and anti-CTLA4). Results. A twelve differentially expressed EMT-related lncRNA prognostic signature performed superior in predicting the overall survival of KIRC patients. High-risk patients were observed with a significantly higher immune checkpoint expression and showed better responses to the targeted therapy and immunotherapy. Conclusions. Our study demonstrates that the twelve differentially expressed EMT-related lncRNA prognostic signature could act as an efficient prognostic indicator for KIRC, which also contributes to the decision-making of the further treatment.