Identification and validation of a prognostic signature of autophagy, apoptosis and pyroptosis-related genes for head and neck squamous cell carcinoma: to imply therapeutic choices of HPV negative patients

作者：Zhaodi Nan, Yu Dou, Anwei Chen, Ketao Wang, Jintang Sun, Zhen Meng, Markus Neckenig, Dan Ai, Shaohua Liu, Zuoqing Dong, Chao Ma, Yufeng Cheng, Xun Qu · 发表于：Frontiers in Immunology · 年份：2023 · DOI：10.3389/fimmu.2022.1100417 · 被引用次数：26 · 研究领域：Inflammasome and immune disorders、Ferroptosis and cancer prognosis、Autophagy in Disease and Therapy

Introduction: An effective tool is needed to predict the prognosis of head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC). Human papillomavirus (HPV) positive HNSCC patients generally have a favorable survival and a promising responsiveness to radiotherapy, chemoradiotherapy and checkpoint blockades. However, HPV negative patients, the majority of HNSCC patients, have been largely overlooked. Cell death has been involved in the therapeutic resistance of cancers. To this end, we aimed to identify the association of autophagy, apoptosis and pyroptosis-related genes with the prognosis of HNSCC, and construct a prognostic signature to predict the prognosis for HNSCC, especially for HPV negative HNSCC. Methods: Autophagy and apoptosis-related genes were obtained from Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (GSEA) website, and pyroptosis-related genes were obtained from GSEA and Gene Ontology (GO) database. We established the cell death index (CDI) based on RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) data and clinicopathological information from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) dataset. The prognostic value of CDI was verified by Kaplan-Meier, receiver operating characteristic (ROC) and univariate and multivariate Cox regression analyses in TCGA dataset, and validated with the datasets from Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) and Qilu Hospital of Shandong University. We further assessed the immune microenvironment of patients with high and low CDI scores. Moreover, the expression of the signature genes in HNSCC cell lines we...