Tongue squamous cell carcinoma (TSCC) accounts for 40% of all squamous cell carcinoma involving the mucosal surface of the oral cavity. TSCC is highly invasive and aggressive and, nowadays, TNM staging system is considered the gold standard in predicting patients’ outcomes. Nevertheless, patients with tumors classified under the same TNM stage, can undergo different outcomes, with differences in behavior, aggressiveness and therapy response. This panorama calls for new biomarkers which could be used in clinical practice in a precision medicine point of view []. TCGA Database [] offers wide genome sequencing analysis, including mRNA expression of whole genome. We included patients with TSCC and we downloaded data of mRNA expression per patient and survival outcome []. We performed a differential expression analysis and ranking according to the outcome. This bioinformatics approach led to the detection of 12 promising genes which resulted to be able to predict patients’ prognosis. Poor is known about the detected genes and future studies are needed to test this gene panel in order to assess the accuracy in predicting death in an external cohort of patients. In addition, since these genes could be linked to a higher risk of patient’s death, they could be actor in some pathological pathways, which characterize the tumor biology, for example in chemotherapy resistance, metastasis or tumor growth [].
Conflicts of Interest
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
References
- Moeckelmann, N.; Ebrahimi, A. Prognostic implications of the 8th edition American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) staging system in oral cavity squamous cell carcinoma. Oral Oncol. 2018, 85, 82–86. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef] [PubMed]
- TCGA Database. Available online: https://www.cancer.gov/tcga (accessed on 25 November 2019).
- Grossman Robert, L.; Heath Allison, P. Toward a Shared Vision for Cancer Genomic Data. N. Engl. J. Med. 2016, 375, 1109–1112. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef] [PubMed]
- Almangush, A.; Heikkinen, I.; Heikkinen, I.; Makitie, A.A.; Coletta, R.D.; Läärä, E.; Leivo, I.; Salo, T. Reply to Comment on Prognostic biomarkers for oral tongue squamous cell carcinoma: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Br. J. Cancer 2017, 117, 856–866. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef] [PubMed]
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. |
© 2019 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).