Identification of a Novel Ferroptosis-Related Gene Signature for Predicting Prognosis and Responsiveness to Immunotherapy in Hepatocellular Carcinoma

Qingbin Wang; Bingkun Wang; Xiaowu Ma; Hongkai Zhuang; Zhiqin Xie; Chenwei Tang; Wenliang Tan; Lei Yang; Changzhen Shang; Yajin Chen

doi:10.2147/JHC.S395563

Identification of a Novel Ferroptosis-Related Gene Signature for Predicting Prognosis and Responsiveness to Immunotherapy in Hepatocellular Carcinoma

J Hepatocell Carcinoma. 2023 Jan 10:10:1-16. doi: 10.2147/JHC.S395563. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Qingbin Wang^#^{1

2}, Bingkun Wang^#^{1

2}, Xiaowu Ma^{1

2}, Hongkai Zhuang^{1

2}, Zhiqin Xie^{1

2}, Chenwei Tang^{1

2}, Wenliang Tan^{1

2}, Lei Yang^{1

2}, Changzhen Shang^{1

2}, Yajin Chen^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Malignant Tumor Epigenetics and Gene Regulation, Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, People's Republic of China.
² Department of Hepatobiliary Surgery, Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, People's Republic of China.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

Purpose: Ferroptosis has been reported to regulate multiple biological behaviors. However, the prognostic and oncologic values of ferroptosis-related genes (FRGs) have not been comprehensively elucidated in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Here, we aimed to construct FRGs-associated signature for stratification of the prognosis of HCC patients.

Methods: A list of FRGs was generated from FerrDb. Public databases were used to extract expression matrices and clinical information. TCGA cohort was randomly divided into a training set and a validation set. Prognostic signature for Overall Survival (OS) was established in training set and validated in internal cohorts (TCGA validation set and entire set) and external cohort (ICGC cohort). Additionally, the role of signature in HCC was well investigated by analysis of mutations, gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA), analysis of immune infiltrates, and analysis of response to immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) treatment. The oncogenic effects of ZFP69B on HCC were also investigated in vitro.

Results: We identified 12 FRGs-based signature for OS with LASSO regression. Patients were partitioned into different risk groups based on the signature. Overall, patients in different groups had different prognosis. The signature independently predicted OS in multivariate Cox regression analyses. Anti-tumor immune cells including activated CD8 T cells, cytolytic activity, and Th1 cells were negatively correlated with risk score in both TCGC and ICGC cohorts. Furthermore, low-risk patients responded better to ICB than high-risk patients. In addition, knockdown of ZFP69B reduced proliferation, migration, and invasion, and promoted erastin-induced ferroptosis of HCC cells.

Conclusion: We developed a prognostic signature based on FRGs to predict OS of HCC patients. And the signature may facilitate clinicians in identifying those who are likely to benefit from ICIs. The results also indicated that ZFP69B might regulate the process of ferroptosis and could be used as a novel potential target for HCC.

Keywords: ferroptosis; hepatocellular carcinoma; immunotherapy; overall survival; signature.

Grants and funding

This work was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 81972263, 82072714, and 82103221), the program of Guangdong Provincial Clinical Research Center for Digestive Diseases (2020B1111170004), and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2020M683094).