Research Paper|Volume 13, Issue 4|pp 5485—5505

Tumor microenvironment characterization in triple-negative breast cancer identifies prognostic gene signature

Yan Qin¹, Jiehua Deng¹, Lihua Zhang¹, Jiaxing Yuan¹, Huawei Yang¹, Qiuyun Li¹

¹Department of Breast Surgery, Guangxi Medical University Cancer Hospital, Nanning 530021, Guangxi, People's Republic of China

* Equal contribution

Received: August 3, 2020Accepted: October 31, 2020Published: February 1, 2021

https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.202478

Copyright: © 2021 Qin 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

We aimed to elucidate the landscape of tumor microenvironment (TME) in triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC). Cohorts from Gene Expression Omnibus database (N = 107) and METABRIC (N = 299) were used as the training set and validation set, respectively. TME was evaluated via single-sample gene set enrichment analysis, and unsupervised clustering was used for cluster identification. Consequently, TNBC was classified into two distinct TME clusters (Cluster 1 and Cluster 2) according to predefined immune-related terms. Cluster 1 was characterized by low immune infiltration with poor prognosis; whereas, Cluster 2 was characterized by high immune infiltration with better survival probability. Further, Cluster 1 had larger tumor volumes, while Cluster 2 had smaller tumor volumes. Finally, a TME signature for prognosis stratification in TNBC was developed and validated. In summary, we comprehensively evaluated the TME of TNBC and constructed a TME signature that correlated with prognosis. Our results provide new insights for the immunotherapy of TNBC.