A novel gene-pair signature for relapse-free survival prediction in colon cancer.

Background: Colon cancer (CC) patients with early relapse usually have a poor prognosis. In this study, we aimed to identify a novel signature to improve the prediction of relapse-free survival (RFS) in CC.

Methods: Four microarray datasets were merged into a training set (n=1,045), and one RNA-sequencing dataset was used as a validation set (n=384). In the training set, microarray meta-analysis screened out 596 common RFS-related genes across datasets, which were used to construct 177,310 gene pairs. Then, the LASSO penalized generalized linear model identified 16 RFS-related gene pairs, and a risk score was calculated for each sample according to the model coefficients.

Results: The risk score demonstrated a good ability in predicting RFS (area under the curve [AUC] at 5 years: 0.724; concordance index [C-index]: 0.642, 95% CI: 0.615-0.669). High-risk patients showed a poorer prognosis than low-risk patients (HR: 3.519, 95% CI: 2.870-4.314). Subgroup analysis reached consistent results when considering multiple confounders. In the validation set, the risk score had a similar performance (AUC at 5 years: 0.697; C-index: 0.696, 95% CI: 0.627-0.766; HR: 2.926, 95% CI: 1.892-4.527). When compared with a 13-gene signature, a 15-gene signature, and TNM stage, the score showed a better performance ( P <0.0001; P =0.0004; P =0.0125), especially for the patients with a longer follow-up ( R 2=0.988, P <0.0001). When the follow-up was >5 years (n=314), the score demonstrated an excellent performance (C-index: 0.869, 95% CI: 0.816-0.922; HR: 13.55, 95% CI: 7.409-24.78).

Conclusion: Our study identified a novel gene-pair signature for prediction of RFS in CC.