Breast cancer is the most common malignant tumor in women worldwide. However, advanced multidisciplinary therapy cannot rescue the mortality of high-risk breast cancer metastasis. Ferroptosis is a newly discovered form of regulating cell death that related to cancer treatment, especially in eradicating aggressive malignancies that are resistant to traditional therapies. However, the prognostic value of ferroptosis-related gene in breast cancer remains unknown.
In this study, a total of 1,057 breast cancer RNA expression data with clinical and follow-up information were downloaded from the TCGA cohort, multivariate Cox regression was used to construct the 11-gene prognostic ferroptosis-related gene signature. The breast cancer patients from the GEO cohort were used for validation. The expression levels of core prognostic genes were also verified in erastin-treated breast cancer cell lines by real-time polymerase chain action (PCR).
Our results showed that 78% ferroptosis-related genes were differentially expressed between breast cancer tumor tissue and adjacent non-tumorous tissues, including 29 of them which were significantly correlated with OS in the univariate Cox regression analysis. Patients were divided into high-risk group and low-risk group by the 11-gene signature. Patients with high-risk scores had a higher probability of death earlier than the low-risk group both in the TCGA construction cohort and in the GEO validation cohort (all
In conclusion, a novel ferroptosis-related gene model can be used for prognostic prediction in breast cancer. New ferroptosis-related genes may be used for breast cancer targeting therapy in the future.