Research Paper Volume 13, Issue 4 pp 5485—5505
Tumor microenvironment characterization in triple-negative breast cancer identifies prognostic gene signature
- 1 Department of Breast Surgery, Guangxi Medical University Cancer Hospital, Nanning 530021, Guangxi, People's Republic of China
Received: August 3, 2020 Accepted: October 31, 2020 Published: February 1, 2021
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.202478How to Cite
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.