The Construction and Analysis of ceRNA Network and Patterns of Immune Infiltration in Mesothelioma With Bone Metastasis

Background: Mesothelioma is a rare and aggressive tumor. Bone metastasis often occurs in the later stages of this disease along with poor quality of life. Thus, it is important to explore the tumorigenesis and bone metastasis mechanism of invasive mesothelioma. For this purpose, we established two nomograms based on tumor-infiltrating immune cells and ceRNA networks to describe the molecular immunity and the clinical prediction of mesothelioma patients with bone metastasis. Method: The expression profiles of mRNAs, lncRNAs, and miRNAs of 87 primary mesotheliomas were obtained from the TCGA database; there were four patients with bone metastasis and 83 patients without. We constructed a ceRNAs network based on the differentially expressed RNAs between mesothelioma and bone metastasis. CIBERSORT was used to distinguish 22 immune cell types from the tumor transcriptomes. Kaplan-Meier survival analysis and the Cox proportional hazards model were used to evaluate the prognostic value of each factor. Prognosis-associated immune cells and ceRNAs were applied to establish prediction nomograms. The receiver operating characteristic curves (ROC) and calibration curves were utilized to assess the discrimination and accuracy of the nomogram. Results: Differential analysis revealed that 20 lncRNAs, 15 miRNAs, and 230 mRNAs were significantly different in mesothelioma samples vs. bone metastasis samples. We constructed the ceRNA network to include 10 protein-coding mRNAs, 8 lncRNAs, and 10 miRNAs. Nine of 28 ceRNAs were found to be significant in the Kaplan-Meier analysis. Out of the 22 cell types, the fraction of dendritic cells resting (P = 0.018) was significantly different between the bone metastasis group and the non-bone metastasis group. The ROC and the calibration curves, based on ceRNA networks and tumor-infiltrating immune cells, respectively, suggested acceptable accuracy (AUC of 3-year survival: 0.827, AUC of 5-year survival: 0.840; AUC of 3-year survival: 0.730; AUC of 5-year survival: 0.753). Notably, based on the co-expression patterns between ceRNAs and Immune cells, we found that the hsa-miR-582-5p, CASP9, dendritic cells resting, ANIX2, T cells CD8, and T cells CD4 memory resting might be associated with the mesothelioma bone metastasis. Conclusion: Based on ceRNA networks and patterns of immune infiltration, our study provided a valid bioinformatics basis in order to explore the molecular mechanism and predict the possibility of mesothelioma bone metastasis.