Patients with colon cancer are often faced a high risk of disease recurrence within 5 years of treatment that is the major cause of cancer mortality. Reliable molecular markers were required to improve the most effective personalized therapy. Here, we identified a recurrence-associated six-lncRNA (long non-coding RNA) signature (LINC0184, AC105243.1, LOC101928168, ILF3-AS1, MIR31HG, and AC006329.1) that can effectively distinguish between high and low risk of cancer recurrence from 389 patients of a discovery dataset, and validated its robust performance in four independent datasets comprising a total of 906 colon cancer patients. We found that the six-lncRNA signature was an independent predictive factor of disease recurrence in multivariate analysis and was superior to the performance of clinical factors and known gene signature. Furthermore, in silico functional analysis showed that the six-lncRNA-signature-associated coding genes are significantly enriched in proliferation and angiogenesis, cell death, as well as critical cancer pathways that could play important roles in colon cancer recurrence. Together, the six-lncRNA signature holds great potential for recurrence risk assessment and personalized management of colon cancer patients.

结肠癌患者通常在治疗的5年内面临疾病复发的高风险，这是癌症死亡的主要原因。需要可靠的分子标记物来改善最有效的个性化治疗。在这里，我们确定了与复发相关的6-lncRNA（长非编码RNA）签名（LINC0184，AC105243.1，LOC101928168，ILF3-AS1，MIR31HG和AC006329.1）可以有效地区分来自389名发现数据集患者的癌症复发的高风险和低风险，并在包括906名结肠癌患者在内的四个独立数据集中验证了其强大的性能。我们发现六-lncRNA签名是多变量分析中疾病复发的独立预测因素，并且优于临床因素和已知基因签名的性能。此外，in silico功能分析表明，六个与lncRNA签名相关的编码基因在增殖和血管生成，细胞死亡以及可能在结肠癌复发中发挥重要作用的关键癌症途径中显着丰富。总之，6-lncRNA标记在结肠癌患者的复发风险评估和个性化治疗方面具有巨大的潜力。