The Value of the Stemness Index in Ovarian Cancer Prognosis

Abstract

Ovarian cancer (OC) is one of the most common gynecological malignancies. It is associated with a difficult diagnosis and poor prognosis. Our study aimed to analyze tumor stemness to determine the prognosis feature of patients with OC. At this job, we selected the gene expression and the clinical profiles of patients with OC in the TCGA database. We calculated the stemness index of each patient using the one-class logistic regression (OCLR) algorithm and performed correlation analysis with immune infiltration. We used consensus clustering methods to classify OC patients into different stemness subtypes and compared the differences in immune infiltration between them. Finally, we established a prognostic signature by Cox and LASSO regression analysis. We found a significant negative correlation between a high stemness index and immune score. Pathway analysis indicated that the differentially expressed genes (DEGs) from the low- and high-mRNAsi groups were enriched in multiple functions and pathways, such as protein digestion and absorption, the PI3K-Akt signaling pathway, and the TGF-β signaling pathway. By consensus cluster analysis, patients with OC were split into two stemness subtypes, with subtype II having a better prognosis and higher immune infiltration. Furthermore, we identified 11 key genes to construct the prognostic signature for patients with OC. Among these genes, the expression levels of nine, including SFRP2, MFAP4, CCDC80, COL16A1, DUSP1, VSTM2L, TGFBI, PXDN, and GAS1, were increased in the high-risk group. The analysis of the KM and ROC curves indicated that this prognostic signature had a great survival prediction ability and could independently predict the prognosis for patients with OC. We established a stemness index-related risk prognostic module for OC, which has prognostic-independent capabilities and is expected to improve the diagnosis and treatment of patients with OC.