scholarly journals Novel Immune-Related Gene-Based Signature Characterizing an Inflamed Microenvironment Predicts Prognosis and Radiotherapy Efficacy in Glioblastoma

2022 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hang Ji ◽  
Hongtao Zhao ◽  
Jiaqi Jin ◽  
Zhihui Liu ◽  
Xin Gao ◽  
...  

Effective treatment of glioblastoma (GBM) remains an open challenge. Given the critical role of the immune microenvironment in the progression of cancers, we aimed to develop an immune-related gene (IRG) signature for predicting prognosis and improving the current treatment paradigm of GBM. Multi-omics data were collected, and various bioinformatics methods, as well as machine learning algorithms, were employed to construct and validate the IRG-based signature and to explore the characteristics of the immune microenvironment of GBM. A five-gene signature (ARPC1B, FCGR2B, NCF2, PLAUR, and S100A11) was identified based on the expression of IRGs, and an effective prognostic risk model was developed. The IRG-based risk model had superior time-dependent prognostic performance compared to well-studied molecular pathology markers. Besides, we found prominent inflamed features in the microenvironment of the high-risk group, including neutrophil infiltration, immune checkpoint expression, and activation of the adaptive immune response, which may be associated with increased hypoxia, epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) wild type, and necrosis. Notably, the IRG-based risk model had the potential to predict the effectiveness of radiotherapy. Together, our study offers insights into the immune microenvironment of GBM and provides useful information for clinical management of this desperate disease.

2021 ◽  
Vol 39 (15_suppl) ◽  
pp. e15565-e15565
Author(s):  
Qiqi Zhu ◽  
Du Cai ◽  
Wei Wang ◽  
Min-Er Zhong ◽  
Dejun Fan ◽  
...  

e15565 Background: Few robust predictive biomarkers have been applied in clinical practice due to the heterogeneity of metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC) . Using the gene pair method, the absolute expression value of genes can be converted into the relative order of genes, which can minimize the influence of the sequencing platform difference and batch effects, and improve the robustness of the model. The main objective of this study was to establish an immune-related gene pairs signature (IRGPs) and evaluate the impact of the IRGPs in predicting the prognosis in mCRC. Methods: A total of 205 mCRC patients containing overall survival (OS) information from the training cohort ( n = 119) and validation cohort ( n = 86) were enrolled in this study. LASSO algorithm was used to select prognosis related gene pairs. Univariate and multivariate analyses were used to validate the prognostic value of the IRGPs. Gene sets enrichment analysis (GSEA) and immune infiltration analysis were used to explore the underlying biological mechanism. Results: An IRGPs signature containing 22 gene pairs was constructed, which could significantly separate patients of the training cohort ( n = 119) and validation cohort ( n = 86) into the low-risk and high-risk group with different outcomes. Multivariate analysis with clinical factors confirmed the independent prognostic value of IRGPs that higher IRGPs was associated with worse prognosis (training cohort: hazard ratio (HR) = 10.54[4.99-22.32], P < 0.001; validation cohort: HR = 3.53[1.24-10.08], P = 0.012). GSEA showed that several metastasis and immune-related pathway including angiogenesis, TGF-β-signaling, epithelial-mesenchymal transition and inflammatory response were enriched in the high-risk group. Through further analysis of the immune factors, we found that the proportions of CD4+ memory T cell, regulatory T cell, and Myeloid dendritic cell were significantly higher in the low-risk group, while the infiltrations of the Macrophage (M0) and Neutrophil were significantly higher in the high-risk group. Conclusions: The IRGPs signature could predict the prognosis of mCRC patients. Further prospective validations are needed to confirm the clinical utility of IRGPs in the treatment decision.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jihang Luo ◽  
Puyu Liu ◽  
Leibo Wang ◽  
Yi Huang ◽  
Yuanyan Wang ◽  
...  

Abstract Background Colon cancer is the most common type of gastrointestinal cancer and has high morbidity and mortality. Colon adenocarcinoma(COAD) is the main pathological type of colon cancer. There is a lot of evidence describing the correlation between the prognosis of COAD and the immune system. The objective of the current study was the development of a robust prognostic immune-related gene pairs (IRGPs) model for estimating overall survival of COAD. Methods The gene expression profiles and clinical information of patients with colon adenocarcinoma come from TCGA and GEO databases and are divided into training and validation cohorts. Immune genes were selected which show significantly association with prognosis. Results Among 1647 immune genes, a 17 IRGPs model was built which was significantly associated with OS in the training cohort. In the training and validation data set, the IRGPs model divided patients into high-risk groups and low-risk groups, and the prognosis of the high-risk group was significantly worse( P <0.001). Univariate and multivariate Cox proportional hazard analysis confirmed the feasibility of this model. Functional analysis confirmed that multiple tumor progression and stem cell growth-related pathways in high-risk groups were up-regulated. T cells regulatory and Macrophage M0 were significantly highly expressed in the high-risk group. Conclusion We successfully constructed an IRGPs model that can predict the prognosis of COAD, which provides new insights into the treatment strategy of COAD.


2020 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 096368972097713
Author(s):  
Xueping Jiang ◽  
Yanping Gao ◽  
Nannan Zhang ◽  
Cheng Yuan ◽  
Yuan Luo ◽  
...  

Tumor microenvironment (TME) has critical impacts on the pathogenesis of lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD). However, the molecular mechanism of TME effects on the prognosis of LUAD patients remains unclear. Our study aimed to establish an immune-related gene pair (IRGP) model for prognosis prediction and internal mechanism investigation. Based on 702 TME-related differentially expressed genes (DEGs) extracted from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) training cohort using the ESTIMATE algorithm, a 10-IRGP signature was established to predict LUAD patient prognosis. Gene Ontology and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes analyses showed that DEGs were significantly associated with tumor immune response. In both TCGA training and Gene Expression Omnibus validation datasets, the risk score was an independent prognostic factor for LUAD patients using Lasso-Cox analysis, and patients in the high-risk group had poorer prognosis than those in the low-risk one. In the high-risk group, M2 macrophage and neutrophil infiltrations were higher, while the levels of T cell follicular helpers were significantly lower. The gene set enrichment analysis results showed that DNA repair signaling pathways were involved. In summary, we established an IRGP signature as a potential biomarker to predict the prognosis of LUAD patients.


Author(s):  
Xianghong Zhou ◽  
Shi Qiu ◽  
Di Jin ◽  
Kun Jin ◽  
Xiaonan Zheng ◽  
...  

Abstract Background: Papillary renal carcinoma (PRCC) is one of the important subtypes of kidney cancer, with a high degree of heterogeneity. At present, there is still a lack of robust and accurate biomarkers for the diagnosis, prognosis and treatment selection of PRCC. Considering the important role of tumor immunity in PRCC, we aim to construct a signature based on immune-related gene pairs (IRGPs) to estimate the prognostic of patients with PRCC.Methods: We obtained gene expression profiling and clinical information of patients with PRCC from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO), which were divided into discovery and validation cohorts, respectively. The immune-related genes in the samples were used to construct gene pairs, and the immune-related genes pairs (IRGPs) with robust impact for overall survival (OS) were screened out to construct the signature by univariate analysis, multivariate Cox analysis, and least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (Lasso) analysis. Then we verified the prognostic role of the signature, and assessed the relationship between this signature with tumor immune infiltration and functional pathways.Results: A total of 315 patients were included in our study, and divided to discovery (n=287) and validation (n=28) cohorts. Finally, we selected 14 IRGPs with a panel of 22 unique genes to construct the prognostic signature. According to the signature, we stratified patients into high-risk group and low-risk group. In both discovery and validation cohorts, the results of Kaplan-Meier analysis showed that there were significant differences in OS between the two groups (p<0.001). Combined with multiple clinical pathological factors, the results of multivariate analyses confirmed that this signature was an independent predictor of OS (HR, 3.548; 95%CI, 2.096−6.006; p<0.001). The results of immune infiltration analysis demonstrated that the abundance of multiple tumor-infiltration lymphocytes such as CD8+ T cells, Tregs, and T follicular cell helper were significantly higher in the high-risk group. Functional analysis showed that multiple immune-related signaling pathways were enriched in the high-risk group.Conclusions: We successfully established an individualized prognostic immune-related gene pairs signature, which can accurately and independently predict the OS of patients with PRCC.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruihua Fang ◽  
Lin Chen ◽  
Jing Liao ◽  
Jierong Luo ◽  
Chenchen Zhang ◽  
...  

Abstract Background: Head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC), the most frequent subtype of head and neck cancer, continues to have a poor prognosis with no improvement. Growing evidence has demonstrated that the immune system plays a crucial role in the development and progression of HNSCC. The goal of our study was to develop an immune-related signature for accurately predicting the survival of HNSCC patients. Methods: Gene expression profiles were established from a total of 546 HNSCC and normal tissues to establish a training set and 83 HNSCC tissues for a validation set. Differentially expressed prognostic immune genes were identified by univariate Cox regression analysis and a corresponding network of differentially expressed transcription factors (TFs) were identified using Cytoscape. The immune-related gene signature was established and validated by univariate Cox regression analysis, least absolute shrinkage and selector operation (LASSO), and multivariate Cox regression analyses. In addition, the prognostic value of the immune-related signature was analyzed by survival and Cox regression analysis. Finally, the correlation between the immune-related signature and the immune microenvironment was established.Results: In this study, the TF-mediated network revealed that Foxp3 plays a central role in the regulatory mechanism of most immune genes. A prognostic signature based on 10 immune-related genes, which divided patients into high and low risk groups, was developed and successfully validated using two independent databases. Our prognostic signature was significantly related to worse survival and predicted prognosis in patients with different clinicopathological factors. A nomogram including clinical characteristics was also constructed for accurate prediction. Furthermore, it was determined that our prognostic signature may act as an independent factor for predicting the survival of HNSCC patients. ROC analysis also revealed that our signature had superior predictive value compared with TNM stage. As for the immune microenvironment, our signature showed a positive correlation with activated mast cells and M0 macrophages, a negative correlation with Tregs, and immune checkpoint molecules PD-1 and CLTA-4. Conclusions: Our study established an immune-related gene signature, which not only provides a promising biomarker for survival prediction, but may be evaluated as an indicator for personalized immunotherapy in patients with HNSCC.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zihao Wang ◽  
Xuan Xiang ◽  
Xiaoshan Wei ◽  
Linlin Ye ◽  
Yiran Niu ◽  
...  

Abstract Background. Lung squamous cell carcinoma (LUSC) is one of the subtypes of non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and accounts for approximately 20 to 30% of all lung cancers.Methods. In this study, we developed an immune-related gene pair index (IRGPI) for early-stage LUSC from 3 public LUSC data sets, including The Cancer Genome Atlas LUSC cohort and Gene Expression Omnibus data sets, and explored whether IRGPI could act as a prognostic marker to identify patients with early-stage LUSC at high risk.Results. IRGPI was constructed by 68 gene pairs consisting of 123 unique immune-related genes from TCGA LUSC cohort. In the derivation cohort, the hazard of death among high-risk group was 10.51 times that of the low-risk group (HR, 10.51; 95%CI, 6.96-15.86; p<0.001). The hazard of death among the high-risk group was 2.26 times that of the low-risk group (HR, 2.26; 95%CI, 1.2-4.25; p=0.009) in the GSE37745 validation cohort and was 3.2 times that of low-risk group (HR, 3.2; 95%CI, 0.98-10.4; p=0.042) in the GSE41271 validation cohort. The infiltrations of CD8+ T cells and T follicular helper cells were lower in the high-risk group, as compared with the low-risk group in the TCGA cohort (6.94% vs 9.63%, p=0.004; 2.15% vs 3%, p=0.002, respectively). The infiltrations of neutrophils, activated mast cells and monocytes were higher in the high-risk group, as compared with the low-risk group in the TCGA cohort (1.63% vs 0.72%, p=0.001; 1.64% vs 1.02%, p=0.007; 0.57% vs 0.35%, p=0.041, respectively).Conclusions. IRGPI is a significant prognostic biomarker for predicting overall survival in early-stage LUSC patients.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jihang Luo ◽  
Puyu Liu ◽  
Leibo Wang ◽  
Yi Huang ◽  
Yuanyan Wang ◽  
...  

Abstract Background. Colon cancer is the most common type of gastrointestinal cancer and has high morbidity and mortality. Colon adenocarcinoma(COAD) is the main pathological type of colon cancer. There is a lot of evidence describing the correlation between the prognosis of COAD and the immune system. The objective of the current study was the development of a robust prognostic immune-related gene pairs (IRGPs) model for estimating overall survival of COAD. Methods. The gene expression profiles and clinical information of patients with colon adenocarcinoma come from TCGA and GEO databases and are divided into training and validation cohorts. Immune genes were selected which show significantly association with prognosis. Results. Among 1647 immune genes, a 17 IRGPs model was built which was significantly associated with OS in the training cohort. In the training and validation data set, the IRGPs model divided patients into high-risk groups and low-risk groups, and the prognosis of the high-risk group was significantly worse(P<0.001). Univariate and multivariate Cox proportional hazard analysis confirmed the feasibility of this model. Functional analysis confirmed that multiple tumor progression and stem cell growth-related pathways in high-risk groups were up-regulated. T cells regulatory and Macrophage M0 were significantly highly expressed in the high-risk group. Conclusion. We successfully constructed an IRGPs model that can predict the prognosis of COAD, which provides new insights into the treatment strategy of COAD.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Qianshi Zhang ◽  
Zhen Feng ◽  
Yongnian Zhang ◽  
Shasha Shi ◽  
Yu Zhang ◽  
...  

Background. Colon cancer (CC) is a malignant tumor with a high incidence and poor prognosis. Accumulating evidence shows that the immune signature plays an important role in the tumorigenesis, progression, and prognosis of CC. Our study is aimed at establishing a novel robust immune-related gene pair signature for predicting the prognosis of CC. Methods. Gene expression profiles and corresponding clinical information are obtained from two public data sets: The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO, GSE39582). We screened out immune-related gene pairs (IRGPs) associated with prognosis in the discovery cohort. Lasso-Cox proportional hazard regression was used to develop the best prognostic signature model. According to this, the patients in the validation cohort were divided into high immune-risk group and low immune-risk group, and the prediction ability of the signature model was verified by survival analysis and independent prognostic analysis. Results. A total of 17 IRGPs composed of 26 IRGs were used to construct a prognostic-related risk scoring model. This model accurately predicted the prognosis of CC patients, and the patients in the high immune-risk group indicated poor prognosis in the discovery cohort and validation cohort. Besides, whether in univariate or multivariate analysis, the IRGP signature was an independent prognostic factor. T cell CD4 memory resting in the low-risk group was significantly higher than that in the high-risk group. Functional analysis showed that the biological processes of the low-risk group included “TCA cycle” and “RNA degradation,” while the high-risk group was enriched in the “CAMs” and “focal adhesion” pathways. Conclusion. We have successfully established a signature model composed of 17 IRGPs, which provides a novel idea to predict the prognosis of CC patients.


2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (15_suppl) ◽  
pp. e14534-e14534
Author(s):  
Shihong Wu ◽  
Wanzun Lin ◽  
Youliang Weng ◽  
Yuhui Pan ◽  
Zongwei Huang ◽  
...  

e14534 Background: Glioma, the most common primary brain tumor, accounts for more than 50% of all primary brain tumors. Malignant gliomas, especially glioblastomas, are associated with a dismal prognosis. Hypoxia is a driver of the malignant phenotype in glioma; it triggers a cascade of immunosuppressive processes and malignant cellular responses (tumor progression, metastases, and resistance to chemoradiotherapy), which result in disease progression and poor prognosis. However, approaches to determine the extent of hypoxia in the tumor microenvironment are still unclear. Methods: Here, we enrolled 1626 glioma patients with RNA sequence and survival data in two independent cohorts, and developed a hypoxia risk model to reflect the immune microenvironment in glioma and predict prognosis. Results: High hypoxia risk score was associated with poor prognosis and indicated an immunosuppressive microenvironment. Hypoxia signature significantly correlated with clinical and molecular features and could serve as an independent prognostic factor for glioma patients. Moreover, Gene Set Enrichment Analysis showed that gene sets associated with the high-risk group were involved in carcinogenesis and immunosuppression signaling. Conclusions: In conclusion, we developed and validated a novel hypoxia risk model, which served as an independent prognostic indicator and reflected overall immune response intensity in the glioma microenvironment.


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