Abstract:

Objective：Objective To investigate the genes related to lactic acid metabolism in lung adenocarcinoma （LUAD） tissue and establish the prognostic score model based on the genes related to lactic acid metabolism， and to clarify its ability to predict the prognosis of LUAD. Methods The LUAD related lactate metabolism genes were screened by The Cancer Genome Atlas（TCGA） database.Univariate and multivariate Cox regression analysis and LASSO regression analysis were used to obtain the key genes and the lactate metabolism score model for LUAD was constructed，and the predictive ability of the model was verified by Kaplan-Meier survival analysis and receiver operating characteristic（ROC） curve， and the relationships between the model and the clinical characteristics of the patient and the abundances of immune cell infiltration were evaluated by TIMER method. Results Sixteen lactate metabolism genes were successfully screened and the score model was constructed. The survival analysis results showed that the overall survival（OS） of the patients in low-risk group was significantly higher than that in high-risk group （P<0.01）， and the area under ROC curve （AUC） was higher than 0.7；the multivariate Cox regression analysis results showed that 23 lactic acid metabolism genes were the independent prognosis genes for the LUAD patients，which could accurately assess the survival rate of LUAD patients in combination with other clinical features of the patients（P<0.01），and the lactic acid score was negatively correlated with the percentages of B lymphocytes（r=－0.326，P<0.001），CD4 T lymphocytes（r=－0.196，P<0.001），CD8 T lymphocytes（r=－0.094，P=0.036），macrophages（r=－0.198，P<0.001），and dendritic cells（r=－0.119，P=0.008）. Conclusion The lactate metabolism score model can well evaluate the prognosis of LUAD and the state of tumor microenvironment （TIMER）， and can be used as a biomarker to predict the prognosis of LUAD.

Key words: Lactate, The Cancer Gene Mapping Database, Lung adenocarcinoma, Tumor microenvironment, Prognostic marker