Identification of a prognostic and therapeutic immune signature associated with hepatocellular carcinoma

作者：Yanan Peng, Chang Liu, Mengting Li, Wenjie Li, Mengna Zhang, Xiang Jiang, Ying Chang, Lan Liu, Fan Wang, Qiu Zhao · 发表于：Cancer Cell International · 年份：2021 · DOI：10.1186/s12935-021-01792-4 · 被引用次数：144 · 研究领域：Ferroptosis and cancer prognosis、Cancer Immunotherapy and Biomarkers、Immune cells in cancer

BACKGROUND: Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is one of the most prevalent and inflammation-associated cancers. The tumor microenvironment (TME) plays an essential role in HCC development and metastasis, leading to poor prognosis. The overall TME immune cells infiltration characterizations mediated by immune-related genes (IRGs) remain unclear. In this study, we aimed to investigate whether immune-related genes could be indicators for the prognosis of HCC patients and TME cell infiltration characterization as well as responses to immunotherapy. METHODS: We obtained differentially expressed immune-related genes (DE IRGs) between normal liver tissues and liver cancer tissues from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database. To identify the prognostic genes and establish an immune risk signature, we performed univariable Cox regression survival analysis and the Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selector Operation (LASSO) regression based on the DE IRGs by robust rank aggregation method. Cox regression analysis was used to identify independent prognostic factors in HCC. We estimated the immune cell infiltration in TME via CIBERSORT and immunotherapy response through TIDE algorithm. RESULTS: We constructed an immune signature and validated its predictive capability. The immune signature included 7 differentially expressed IRGs: BIRC5, CACYBP, NR0B1, RAET1E, S100A8, SPINK5, and SPP1. The univariate and multivariate cox analysis showed that the 7-IRGs signature was a robust independent prognos...