Research Paper Volume 13, Issue 9 pp 12691—12709
Immune subgroup analysis for non-small cell lung cancer may be a good choice for evaluating therapeutic efficacy and prognosis
- 1 Department of Oncology, Jinan Central Hospital, Shandong University, Jinan 250013, Shandong, P.R. China
- 2 Department of Radiotherapy Oncology, Shandong Provincial Qianfoshan Hospital, Shandong University, Jinan 250014, Shandong, P.R. China
- 3 Department of Radiotherapy Oncology, Shandong Provincial Qianfoshan Hospital, The First Hospital Affiliated with Shandong First Medical University, Jinan 250014, Shandong, P.R. China
- 4 Jinan Clinical Research Center of Shandong First Medical University, Jinan 250013, Shandong, P.R. China
- 5 Department of Cardiovascular Diseases, Jinan Central Hospital Affiliated to Shandong University, Jinan 250013, Shandong, P.R. China
- 6 Department of Oncology, Jinan Central Hospital Affiliated to Shandong First Medical University, Jinan 250013, Shandong, P.R. China
Received: December 2, 2020 Accepted: March 4, 2021 Published: May 11, 2021
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.202941How to Cite
Abstract
Due to its effectiveness, cancer immunotherapy has attracted widespread attention from clinicians and scientific researchers. Numerous studies have proven that effective stratification of cancer patients would promote the personalized application of immunotherapy. Therefore, we used the transcriptome data of nearly 1,000 patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) to construct a new immune subgroup. We found that the new immune subgroup, named cluster 2, was a mixture of lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) and lung squamous cell carcinoma (LUSC), and showed poor overall survival, which was further verified in the independent validation set. Immune infiltration correlation analysis showed that the Mast cell type and its status subdivisions had a predictive effect on the prognosis of NSCLC, especially in LUAD. Phenotypic analysis suggested that epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) was positively correlated with immunosuppression, supporting the correlation between tumor phenotype and immune background. Although immune subtypes failed to significantly distinguish the progression-free survival (PFS) of immunotherapy patients, they showed the expected trend; the sample size needs to be further expanded for verification. In addition, some results indicated that the two cancer types, LUAD and LUSC, might require independent analyses.
Abbreviations
PD-1: Programmed Cell Death-1; PD-L1: Programmed Cell Death Ligand 1; NSCLC: Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer; LUAD: Lung adenocarcinoma; LUSC: Lung squamous cell carcinoma; EMT: Epithelial mesenchymal transition; PFS: progression-free survival; TCGA: The Cancer Genome Atlas; GEO: Gene Expression Omnibus; CNV: Copy Number Variation; GDC: Genomic Data Commons; CDF: Cumulative Distribution Function; TIME: Tumor Immune Microenvironment; FPKM: Fragments Per Kilobase of Exon Model Per Million Mapped Reads; CDS: Connected Dominating Set; LM22: Leukocyte signature Matrix 22; AJCC: American Joint Committee on Cancer; TMB: Tumor Mutation Burden; GSVA: Gene Set Variation Analysis; GSEA: Gene Set Enrichment Analysis; OncoKB: Oncology Knowledge Base; PD: progressive disease; SD: stable disease; CR: complete response; PR: partial response.