Proteomic profiling reveals a signature for optimizing prognostic prediction in Colon Cancer

Zezhi Shan^1,2*, Dakui Luo^1,2*, Qi Liu^1,2*, Sanjun Cai^1,2, Renjie Wang^1,2✉, Yanlei Ma^1,2✉, Xinxiang Li^1,2✉

1. Department of Colorectal Surgery, Fudan University Shanghai Cancer Center, Shanghai 200032, China.
2. Department of Oncology, Shanghai Medical College, Fudan University, Shanghai 200032, China.
*These authors contributed equally to this work.

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Citation:
Shan Z, Luo D, Liu Q, Cai S, Wang R, Ma Y, Li X. Proteomic profiling reveals a signature for optimizing prognostic prediction in Colon Cancer. J Cancer 2021; 12(8):2199-2205. doi:10.7150/jca.50630. Available from https://www.jcancer.org/v12p2199.htm

Abstract

Previous studies developed prognostic signatures largely depended on transcriptome profiles. The purpose of our present study was to develop a proteomic signature to optimize the evaluation of prognosis of colon cancer patients. The proteomic data of colon cancer patient cohorts were downloaded from The Cancer Proteome Atlas (TCPA). Patients were randomized 3:2 to train set and internal validation set. Univariate Cox regression and lasso Cox regression analysis were performed to identify the prognostic proteins. A four-protein signature was developed to divide patients into a high-risk group and low-risk group with significantly different survival outcomes in both train set and internal validation set. Time-dependent receiver-operating characteristic at 1 year demonstrated that the proteomic signature presented more prognostic accuracy [area under curve (AUC = 0.704)] than the American Joint Commission on Cancer tumor-node-metastasis (AJCC-TNM) staging system (AUC = 0.681) in entire set. In conclusion, we developed a proteomic signature which can improve prognostic accuracy of patients with colon cancer and optimize the therapeutic and follow-up strategies.

Keywords: proteomic profiling, colon cancer, prognosis