A 13-gene signature to predict the prognosis and immunotherapy responses of lung squamous cell carcinoma

作者：Qin Yang, Han Gong, Jing Liu, Mao Ye, Wen Zou, Hui Li · 发表于：Scientific Reports · 年份：2022 · DOI：10.1038/s41598-022-17735-6 · 被引用次数：14 · 研究领域：Ferroptosis and cancer prognosis、RNA modifications and cancer、Cancer Immunotherapy and Biomarkers

Lung squamous cell carcinoma (LUSC) comprises 20-30% of all lung cancers. Immunotherapy has significantly improved the prognosis of LUSC patients; however, only a small subset of patients responds to the treatment. Therefore, we aimed to develop a novel multi-gene signature associated with the immune phenotype of the tumor microenvironment for LUSC prognosis prediction. We stratified the LUSC patients from The Cancer Genome Atlas dataset into hot and cold tumor according to a combination of infiltration status of immune cells and PD-L1 expression level. Kaplan-Meier analysis showed that hot tumors were associated with shorter overall survival (OS). Enrichment analyses of differentially expressed genes (DEGs) between the hot and cold tumors suggested that hot tumors potentially have a higher immune response ratio to immunotherapy than cold tumors. Subsequently, hub genes based on the DEGs were identified and protein-protein interactions were constructed. Finally, we established an immune-related 13-gene signature based on the hub genes using the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator feature selection and multivariate cox regression analysis. This gene signature divided LUSC patients into high-risk and low-risk groups and the former inclined worse OS than the latter. Multivariate cox proportional hazard regression analysis showed that the risk model constructed by the 13 prognostic genes was an independent risk factor for prognosis. Receiver operating characteristic c...