A potential panel of two-long non-coding RNA signature to predict recurrence of patients with laryngeal cancer

Accumulating evidence has shown that aberrant lncRNA expression plays an oncogenic or tumor-suppressive role in the tumorigenesis of laryngeal cancer. However, the prognostic roles of lncRNAs in laryngeal cancer recurrence are still poorly understood. In this study, we obtained lncRNA expression profiles of 109 patients with laryngeal cancer by mining previously published gene expression microarray data from the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) and identified two lncRNAs associated with laryngeal cancer recurrence in the training dataset by using Cox regression analysis. Then these two lncRNAs were combined to a two-lncRNA signature for identifying patients at high-risk of disease recurrence. By applying this two-lncRNA signature to the testing dataset, a clear separation was observed in the survival curves between patients with low- or high-risk scores, indicating good reproducibility of this two-lncRNA signature in predicting disease-free survival of laryngeal cancer. Further analysis revealed that the prognostic value of the two-lncRNA signature was independent of other clinical features, including age, stage and grade. Subsequent gene set enrichment analysis suggested that the two-lncRNA signature was more likely to involve with GPCRs downstream signaling pathway, potassium channel pathway and aurora-A pathway. Our study demonstrated that the two-lncRNA signature may be a novel potential biomarker for prognosis of laryngeal cancer and may provide novel insights into the molecular mechanism of laryngeal cancer.