Prognostic value of immune-related genes in laryngeal squamous cell carcinoma

Transl Cancer Res. 2020 Oct;9(10):6287-6302. doi: 10.21037/tcr-20-2173.

Abstract

Background: Laryngeal squamous cell carcinoma (LSCC) is a very common cancer in head and neck. A large amount of evidence indicated that immune genes take a non-negligible part in the occurrence and development of LSCC. We aimed to evaluate the prognostic value of the immune-related genes (IRGs) in LSCC.

Methods: We analyzed the expression profiles of IRGs and clinical information of patients from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) dataset, including one hundred and fourteen LSCC and eleven non-tumor tissues. The uncover molecular mechanisms of these survival-associated IRGs (SAIRGs) were explored by the bioinformatics analyses. A novel prognostic model based on IRGs was developed through multivariate Cox regression.

Results: Twenty-seven differentially expressed SAIRGs in LSCC patients. Copy number alterations, protein-protein interaction (PPI) network, transcription factors (TFs) regulate network were used to identify molecular characteristics of these IRGs. We established an IRGs (TLR2, XCL2, CYSLTR2 and FCGR3B) based prognostic model (IRGPM), which had good performance to predict the prognosis of LSCC (AUC =0.820, P<0.05). Further analysis, we found the IRGPM can reflect the infiltration of several immune cells.

Conclusions: IRGs have a potential role in the occurrence and development of LSCC, and the IRGPM can predict the overall survival rate of LSCC.

Keywords: Laryngeal squamous cell carcinoma (LSCC); bioinformatics analyses; immune genes; markers; prognostic model.