The Prognostic Signature and Therapeutic Value of Phagocytic Regulatory Factors in Prostate Adenocarcinoma (PRAD)

Shiyong Xin; Xianchao Sun; Liang Jin; Weiyi Li; Xiang Liu; Liqing Zhou; Lin Ye

doi:10.3389/fgene.2022.877278

The Prognostic Signature and Therapeutic Value of Phagocytic Regulatory Factors in Prostate Adenocarcinoma (PRAD)

Front Genet. 2022 May 30:13:877278. doi: 10.3389/fgene.2022.877278. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Shiyong Xin¹, Xianchao Sun¹, Liang Jin¹, Weiyi Li¹, Xiang Liu², Liqing Zhou³, Lin Ye¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Urology, Shanghai East Hospital, School of Medicine, Tongji University, Shanghai, China.
² Department of Urology, Shanghai Tenth People's Hospital, School of Medicine, Tongji University, Shanghai, China.
³ Department of Rheumatology and Immunology, The First Affiliated Hospital, and College of Clinical Medicine of Henan University of Science and Technology, Luoyang, China.

Abstract

There is growing evidence that phagocytosis regulatory factors (PRFs) play important roles in tumor progression, and therefore, identifying and characterizing these factors is crucial for understanding the mechanisms of cellular phagocytosis in tumorigenesis. Our research aimed to comprehensively characterize PRFs in prostate adenocarcinoma (PRAD) and to screen and determine important PRFs in PRAD which may help to inform tumor prognostic and therapeutic signatures based on these key PRFs. Here, we first systematically described the expression of PRFs in PRAD and evaluated their expression patterns and their prognostic value. We then analyzed prognostic phagocytic factors by Cox and Lasso analysis and constructed a phagocytic factor-mediated risk score. We then divided the samples into two groups with significant differences in overall survival (OS) based on the risk score. Then, we performed correlation analysis between the risk score and clinical features, immune infiltration levels, immune characteristics, immune checkpoint expression, IC50 of several classical sensitive drugs, and immunotherapy efficacy. Finally, the Human Protein Atlas (HPA) database was used to determine the protein expression of 18 PRF characteristic genes. The aforementioned results confirmed that multilayer alterations of PRFs were associated with the prognosis of patients with PRAD and the degree of macrophage infiltration. These findings may provide us with potential new therapies for PRAD.

Keywords: PRAD; immune infiltration; phagocytic factor; prostate cancer; survival analysis.