Abstract
Head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) is an immunosuppressive malignancy accompanied by noted alterations in various immune cells and cytokines. Recognition of the immune system’s role in contributing to cancer development is an important advancement in our original understanding of carcinoma. We obtained HNSCC gene expression and clinical data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database. We assessed the relative proportion of 22 Infiltrating immune cell types in both HNSCC and adjacent non-cancer tissues using Cell-type Identification By Estimating Relative Subsets Of RNA Transcripts (CIBERSORT) method, identifying the influence of the immune cells content in tumor staging and survival prediction. We further predicted the tumor purity, and the presence of infiltrating stromal/immune cells in HNSCC tissues using Estimation of STromal and Immune cells in Malignant Tumor tissues using Expression data (ESTIMATE) algorithm, identifying its potential correlation with patient survival. Stromal and immune score-associated differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were subsequently verified and their roles in immune response were displayed by functional enrichment analysis and protein-protein interaction (PPI) network. Our research demonstrated the underlying association between the immune microenvironment and HNSCC, and the results were intended to serve as valuable terms for HNSCC diagnosis, prognosis, and targeted immune therapy.
Highlights
Head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC), accounting for nearly 95% of head and neck cancer cases, is the sixth most common type of malignant tumor worldwide
An algorithm called ESTIMATE (Estimation of STromal and Immune cells in MAlignant Tumor tissues using Expression data) can be applied to tumor purity prediction based on single sample gene set enrichment analysis which generates three scores: stromal score that captures the presence of stroma in tumor tissue, immune score that represents the infiltration of immune cells in tumor tissue, and ESTIMATE score that infers tumor purity [11]
We planned to distinguish related infiltrating non-tumor cells and genes which contributed to HNSCC development based on gene expression and clinical data of HNSCC patients on The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database
Summary
Head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC), accounting for nearly 95% of head and neck cancer cases, is the sixth most common type of malignant tumor worldwide. We first assessed the relative proportion of 22 Infiltrating immune cell types in both HNSCC and adjacent non-cancer tissues from TCGA database using Cell-type Identification By Estimating Relative Subsets Of RNA Transcripts (CIBERSORT) method, identifying the influence of the immune cells content in tumor staging and survival prediction. It provides valuable targets for tumor immune therapy. Our research demonstrated the underlying association between immune microenvironment and HNSCC, and the results were intended to serve as valuable terms in HNSCC diagnosis, prognosis and targeted immune therapy
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