Identification of a pyroptosis-related prognostic signature in bladder cancer and RT-qPCR validation

Abstract

Abstract Bladder carcinoma (BC) remains one of the commonly occurring cancers worldwide. Pyroptosis promotes the development of various tumors, but its role in the progression of bladder cancer as well as its effect on prognosis remain unclear. TCGA dataset was used as training set, GSE32894 as well as GSE48276 were used as test sets. We identified 19 DEGs related to pyroptosis between bladder cancer tissues and normal bladder tissues, 6 genes were further clarified as prognosis-associated genes. Through stepwise K-M analyses and stepwise multiCox analyses, we established a prognostic model, and the model had high specificity and sensitivity in predicting the patients’ prognosis. Independence analysis suggested that the survival of bladder cancer patients could be independently predicted by the risk signature. Further, we found differences in tumor immune cells infiltration, tumor mutation burden (TMB), immune checkpoints, and drug sensitivity among different risk groups. Our study confirmed the critical prognosis role of pyroptosis-related genes in bladder cancer. Our prognostic model may offer a new perspective for the therapy of bladder cancer.