Novel cuprotosis-related gene signature: a prognostic indicator and regulator of the glioma immune microenvironment.

BACKGROUND

Glioma is a primary malignant brain tumor with a poor prognosis. Glioma-related biomarkers need to be identified to enable the personalized treatment of and predict the prognosis of glioma patients. Cuproptosis is an unusual mechanism of cell death, and is closely associated with disease progression and the immune-microenvironment of the tumor. However, the function of cuproptosis in glioma is still unclear, therefore the aim of this study was to investigate the role of cuproptosis-related genes in gliomas.

METHODS

We examined the relationship between cuproptosis and glioma using the clinical and expression data of glioma tumors from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and the Chinese Glioma Genome Atlas (CGGA).

RESULTS

First, we determined the rate of somatic mutations and copy number variations (CNVs) of 51 copper homeostasis-related genes and studied their correlation with prognosis. We then identified three molecular subgroups of copper homeostasis-related genes linked to prognosis. We discovered that different subgroups had distinct immune and biological features. We then developed a prognostic model by least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) regression that comprised four cuproptosis-related genes; that is, a solute carrier family 31 member A1 (), microtubule-associated protein tau (), ATPase beta (), and six-transmembrane epithelial antigen of prostate 3 (). This model was found to have strong prognostic ability in the CGGA cohort (P<0.05).

CONCLUSIONS

We investigated the function of copper homeostasis-related genes in neuroglioma and their relationship with tumor immunology. Our in-depth analyses revealed that these biomarkers are useful for diagnostic and prognostic purposes and could be used to guide our understanding of the progression of and treatment of glioma tumorigenesis.