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Research Paper|Volume 12, Issue 1|pp 965—977

Prediction of hepatocellular carcinoma prognosis based on expression of an immune-related gene set

Yuting He1,2, Qin Dang1,2, Jie Li1,2, Qiyao Zhang1,2, Xiao Yu1,2, Miaomiao Xue3, Wenzhi Guo1,2
  • 1Department of Hepatobiliary and Pancreatic Surgery, The First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou 450052, Henan, P.R. China
  • 2Key Laboratory of Hepatobiliary and Pancreatic Surgery and Digestive Organ Transplantation of Henan Province, The First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou 450052, Henan, P.R. China
  • 3Department of General Dentistry, The First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou 450052, Henan, P.R. China
* Equal contribution
Received: September 27, 2019Accepted: December 24, 2019Published: January 12, 2020
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.102669

Copyright: © 2020 He et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a common type of malignant tumor with an extremely poor prognosis. Because many HCC patients are diagnosed with advanced disease, surgical treatment is typically not possible, and other currently available treatments are often ineffective. Immunotherapy is being explored as a new treatment method for a variety of cancers, including HCC. However, there have been no systematic reports about the relationship between immune-related genes and HCC patient prognosis. In this study, we established and verified a gene set-based model to examine the relationship between immune-related genes and prognosis in HCC patients. The model was based on a dataset from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), and its stability and reliability was confirmed in four verification datasets. In addition, we performed multivariate Cox regression analyses to identify the independent risk factors affecting HCC patient prognoses. We found that this new model based on immune-related genes was effective for predicting prognosis, evaluating disease state, and identifying treatment options for HCC patients.