Abstract
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), a highly aggressive tumor, has high incidence and mortality rates. Recently, immunotherapies have been shown to be a promising treatment in HCC. The results of either the CheckMate-040 or IMbrave 150 trials demonstrate the importance of immunotherapy in the systemic treatment of liver cancer. Thus, in this study, we tried to establish a reliable prognostic model for liver cancer based on immune-related genes (IRGs) and to provide a new insight for immunotherapy of HCC. In this study, we used four datasets that incorporated 851 HCC samples, including 340 samples with complete clinical information from the cancer genome atlas (TCGA) database, to establish an effective model for predicting the prognosis of HCC patients based on the differential expression of IRGs and validated the prognostic model using the data from International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC). The top 6 characteristic IRGs identified by protein-protein interaction (PPI) network analysis, MMP9, FOS, CAT, ESR1, ANGPTL3, and KLKB1, were selected for further study. In addition, we assessed the correlations of the six characteristic IRGs with the tumor immune microenvironment, clinical stage, and sensitivity to anti-cancer drugs. We also explored whether the differential expression of the characteristic IRGs was specific to HCC or present in pan-cancer. The expression levels of the six characteristic IRGs were significantly different between most tumor tissues and adjacent normal tissues. In addition, these characteristic IRGs showed a strong association with immune cell infiltration in HCC patients. We found that MMP9 and ESR1 were independent prognostic factors for HCC, while CAT, ESR1, and KLKB1 were associated with the clinical stage. We collected HCC paraffin sections from 24 patients from Xijing hospital to identify the differential expression of the five genes (MMP9, ESR1, CAT, FOS, and KLKB1). Finally, the results of decision curve analysis (DCA) and nomogram revealed that our models provided a prognostic benefit for most HCC patients and the predicted overall survival (OS) was consistent with the actual OS. In conclusion, we systemically constructed a novel prognostic model that provides new insights into HCC.
Highlights
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), a common primary malignant tumor, accounts for almost 85% of all liver cancers (Sung et al, 2021)
We analyzed the effect of the six characteristic immune-related genes (IRGs) on the HCC immune microenvironment and found positive correlations between their expression levels and the infiltration of a variety of immune cells
Two characteristic IRGs (MMP9 and ESR1) were significantly associated with the prognosis of HCC, and multifactorial Cox regression analysis showed that they were independent prognostic factors
Summary
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), a common primary malignant tumor, accounts for almost 85% of all liver cancers (Sung et al, 2021). The worldwide incidence and mortality rates of HCC rank sixth and third, and in 2020 approximately 906,000 new cases of HCC and 830,000 related deaths were estimated to occur (Sung et al, 2021). The incidence and mortality rates of HCC depend on the patient’s race, region, age, sex, and risk factors related to tumor progression (Kulik and El-Serag, 2019; Sung et al, 2021). Previous studies found that the prognosis of patients with HCC is associated with their immune microenvironment and clinical pathological features (Ayuso et al, 2018; Zhang et al, 2019). There is no effective prognostic model for HCC that systematically assesses immune-related genes (IRGs) together with clinicopathological features
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