TY - JOUR TI - A four-DNA methylation biomarker is a superior predictor of survival of patients with cutaneous melanoma AU - Guo, Wenna AU - Zhu, Liucun AU - Zhu, Rui AU - Chen, Qihan AU - Wang, Qiang AU - Chen, Jian-Qun A2 - Murphy, Maureen A2 - van Lohuizen, Maarten VL - 8 PY - 2019 DA - 2019/06/06 SP - e44310 C1 - eLife 2019;8:e44310 DO - 10.7554/eLife.44310 UR - https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.44310 AB - Cutaneous melanoma (CM) is a life-threatening form of skin cancer. Prognostic biomarkers can reliably stratify patients at initial melanoma diagnosis according to risk, and may inform clinical decisions. Here, we performed a retrospective, cohort-based study analyzing genome-wide DNA methylation of 461 patients with CM from the TCGA database. Cox regression analyses were conducted to establish a four-DNA methylation signature that was significantly associated with the overall survival (OS) of patients with CM, and that was validated in an independent cohort. Corresponding Kaplan–Meier analysis displayed a distinct separation in OS. The ROC analysis confirmed that the predictive signature performed well. Notably, this signature exhibited much higher predictive accuracy in comparison with known biomarkers. This signature was significantly correlated with immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) immunotherapy-related signatures, and may have potential as a guide for measures of responsiveness to ICB immunotherapy. KW - prognostic biomarker KW - DNA methylation KW - cutaneous melanoma KW - risk stratification KW - immune-checkpoint blockade JF - eLife SN - 2050-084X PB - eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd ER -