A Three-Metabolic-Genes Risk Score Model Predicts Overall Survival in Clear Cell Renal Cell Carcinoma Patients

Metabolic alterations play crucial roles in carcinogenesis, tumor progression, and prognosis in clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC). A risk score (RS) model for ccRCC consisting of disease-associated metabolic genes remains unidentified. Here, we utilized gene set enrichment analysis to analyze expression data from normal and tumor groups from the cancer genome atlas. Out of 70 KEGG metabolic pathways, we found seven and two pathways to be significantly enriched in our normal and tumor groups, respectively. We identified 113 genes enriched in these nine pathways. We further filtered 47 prognostic-related metabolic genes and used Least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) analysis to construct a three-metabolic-genes RS model composed of ALDH3A2, B3GAT3, and CPT2. We further tested the RS by mapping Kaplan-Meier plots and receiver operating characteristic curves, the results were promising. Additionally, multivariate Cox analysis revealed the RS to be an independent prognostic factor. Thereafter, we considered all the independent factors and constructed a nomogram model, which manifested in better prediction capability. We validated our results using a dataset from ArrayExpress and through qRT-PCR. In summary, our study provided a metabolic gene-based RS model that can be used as a prognostic predictor for patients with ccRCC.