Comprehensive analysis of a novel four-lncRNA signature as a prognostic biomarker for human gastric cancer

Emerging evidence indicates that long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) play a crucial role in predicting survival for gastric cancer (GC) patients. This study aims to identify a lncRNA-related signature for evaluating the overall survival of 379 GC patients from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database. The associations between survival outcome and the expression of lncRNAs were evaluated by the univariate and multivariate Cox proportional hazards regression analyses. Four lncRNAs (LINC01018, LOC553137, MIR4435-2HG, and TTTY14) were identified as significantly correlated with overall survival. These four lncRNAs were gathered as a single prognostic signature. There was a significant positive correlation between GC patients with lowrisk scores and overall survival (P = 0.001). Further analysis suggested that the prognostic value of this four-lncRNA signature was independent in clinical features. Gene set enrichment analysis found that these four lncRNAs were correlated with several molecular pathways of the tumor. Our study indicates that this novel lncRNA expression signature may be a useful biomarker of the prognosis for GC patients, based on bioinformatics analysis.