This study aimed to construct a prognostic stratification system for gastric cancer (GC) using tumour invasion-related genes to more accurately predict the clinical prognosis of GC.
Tumour invasion-related genes were downloaded from CancerSEA, and their expression data in the TCGA-STAD dataset were used to cluster samples
Based on 97 tumour invasion-related genes, 353 GC samples from TCGA were categorised into two subtypes, thereby indicating the presence of inter-subtype differences in prognosis. A total of 569 DEGs were identified between the two subtypes; of which, four genes were selected to construct the risk model. This four-gene signature was robust and exhibited stable predictive performance in different platform datasets (GSE26942 and GSE66229), indicating that the established model performed better than other existing models.
A prognostic stratification system based on a four-gene signature was developed with a desirable area under the curve in the training and independent validation sets. Therefore, the use of this system as a molecular diagnostic test is recommended to assess the prognostic risk of patients with GC.