Prediction and analysis of skin cancer progression using genomics profiles of patients

Metastatic state of the Skin Cutaneous Melanoma (SKCM) has led to high mortality rate worldwide. Previously, various studies have revealed the association of the metastatic melanoma with the diminished survival rate in comparison to primary tumors. Thus, prediction of melanoma at primary tumor state is crucial to employ optimal therapeutic strategy for prolonged survival of patients. The RNA, miRNA and methylation data of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) cohort of SKCM is comprehensively analysed to recognize key genomic features that can categorize various states of metastatic tumors from primary tumors with high precision. Subsequently, various prediction models were developed using filtered genomic features implementing various machine learning techniques to classify these primary tumors from metastatic tumors. The SVC model (with class weight and RBF kernel) developed using 17 mRNA features achieved maximum MCC 0.73 with sensitivity, specificity and accuracy 89.19%, 90.48% and 89.47% respectively on independent validation dataset. Our study reveals that gene expression based features performs better than features obtained from miRNA profiling and epigenomic profiling. Our analysis shows that the expression of genes C7, MMP3, KRT14, KRT17, MASP1, and miRNA hsa-mir-205 and hsa-mir-203a are among the key genomic features that may substantially contribute to the oncogenesis of melanoma even on the basis of simple expression threshold. The major prediction models and analysis modules to predict metastatic and primary tumor samples of SKCM are available from a webserver, CancerSPP (http://webs.iiitd.edu.in/raghava/cancerspp/).