Integrative analysis of TP73 profile prognostic significance in WHO grade II/III glioma

Due to the extremely intrinsic heterogeneity among glioma patients, the outcomes of these patients are tremendously different. Therefore, the exploitation of novel biomarker classification of glioma is vitally important for deep insight into the essence and predicting the prognosis of glioma. We aim to analyze the correlation between TP73 mRNA expression, DNA methylated alteration and the prognosis of WHO grade II/III glioma, utilizing bioinformatics to evaluate its significance as a risk‐factor in predicting the prognosis of these glioma patients. The analysis found that TP73 expression was positively correlated with the grade of glioma, and showed a strong correlation with glioma molecular classification, which revealed significantly higher TP73 expression in IDH‐wildtype than in IDH‐mutant subtype of WHO grade II/III glioma. Cox regression analysis indicated that high expression of TP73 shared an independent high‐risk factor impacting the prognosis of WHO grade II/III glioma. We discovered 8 DNA promoter methylation sites with prognostic significance, which were negatively associated with TP73 expression, and positively associated with beneficial overall survival (OS) and progression‐free survival (PFS). Integrating with four independent glioma datasets, subsequent Meta‐analysis verified that low expression of TP73 was closely related to favorable OS, especially in IDH‐mutant subtype. Moreover, we found that 1p/19qCodel/TP73low subgroup shared the most favorable OS, 1p/19qNon−codel/TP73high subgroup suffered the worst OS. Meanwhile, the enrichment analysis of TP73‐related differential mRNAs demonstrated that TP73 aberration in WHO grade II/III glioma might be closely related to cell cycle and P53 signaling pathways. Finally, TP73 expression of 53 glioma specimens was measured by qRT‐PCR, which was consistent with the previous analytical result, and TP73 high‐expression subgroup suffered worse PFS than TP73 low‐expression subgroup. In summary, our funding supports that TP73 gene can perform as a reliable biomarker to evaluate the survival outcome of patients diagnosed with WHO grade II/III glioma.
TP73 mRNA expression and DNA methylation profile can be a risk factor impacting the prognosis of WHO grade II/III glioma independently, or combining with current glioma molecular classification. Our work showed the significant potential of TP73 gene as a molecular characteristic for evaluating the malignancy and survival outcome of WHO grade II/III glioma.