Establishment and validation of a gene mutation-based risk model for predicting prognosis and therapy response in acute myeloid leukemia

Background: Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is a malignant clonal proliferative disease of hematopoietic system. Despite tremendous progress in uncovering the AML genome, only a small number of mutations have been incorporated into risk stratification and used as therapeutic targets. In this research, we performed to construct a predictive prognosis risk model for AML patients according to gene mutations. Methods: Next-generation sequencing (NGS) technology was utilized to detect gene mutation from 118 patients. mRNA expression profiles and related clinical information were mined from TCGA and GEO databases. Consensus cluster analysis was applied to obtain molecular subtypes, and differences in clinicopathological features, prognosis, and immune microenvironment of different clusters were systematically compared. According to the differentially expressed genes (DEGs) between clusters, univariate and LASSO regression analysis were applied to identify gene signatures to build a prognostic risk model. Patients were classified into high-risk (HR) and low-risk (LR) groups according to the median risk score (RS). Differences in prognosis, immune profile, and therapeutic sensitivity between two groups were analyzed. The independent predictive value of RS was assessed and a nomogram was developed. Results: NGS detected 24 mutated genes, with higher mutation frequencies in CBL (63 %) and SETBP1 (49 %). Two clusters exhibited different immune microenvironments and survival probability (p = 0.0056) were identified. A total of 444 DEGs were screened in two clusters, and a mutation-associated risk model was constructed, including MPO, HGF, SH2B3, SETBP1, HLA-DRB1, LGALS1, and KDM5B. Patients in LR had a superior survival time compared to HR. Predictive performance of this model was confirmed and the developed nomogram further improved the applicability of the risk model with the AUCs for predicting 1-, 3-, 5-year survival rate were 0.829, 0.81 and 0.811, respectively. HR cases were more sensitive to erlotinib, CI-1040, and AZD6244. Conclusion: These findings supplemented the understanding of gene mutations in AML, and constructed models had good application prospect to provide effective information for predicting prognosis and treatment response of AML.