Expression profile analysis identifies key genes as prognostic markers for metastasis of osteosarcoma.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: OS is the most common malignant tumor of bone which was featured with osteoid or immature bone produced by the malignant cells, and biomarkers are urgently needed to identify patients with this aggressive disease. METHODS: We downloaded gene expression profiles from GEO and TARGET datasets for OS, respectively, and performed WGCNA to identify the key module. Whereafter, functional annotation and GSEA demonstrated the relationships between target genes and OS. RESULTS: In this study, we discovered four key genes-ALOX5AP, HLA-DMB, HLA-DRA and SPINT2 as new prognostic markers and confirmed their relationship with OS metastasis in the validation set. CONCLUSIONS: In conclusion, ALOX5AP, HLA-DMB, HLA-DRA and SPINT2 were identified by bioinformatics analysis as possible prognostic markers for OS metastasis.