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Research Paper|Volume 13, Issue 9|pp 12691—12709

Immune subgroup analysis for non-small cell lung cancer may be a good choice for evaluating therapeutic efficacy and prognosis

Yuan Tian1,2,3, Jingnan Wang1, Qing Wen4, Guohai Su5, Yuping Sun1,6
  • 1Department of Oncology, Jinan Central Hospital, Shandong University, Jinan 250013, Shandong, P.R. China
  • 2Department of Radiotherapy Oncology, Shandong Provincial Qianfoshan Hospital, Shandong University, Jinan 250014, Shandong, P.R. China
  • 3Department of Radiotherapy Oncology, Shandong Provincial Qianfoshan Hospital, The First Hospital Affiliated with Shandong First Medical University, Jinan 250014, Shandong, P.R. China
  • 4Jinan Clinical Research Center of Shandong First Medical University, Jinan 250013, Shandong, P.R. China
  • 5Department of Cardiovascular Diseases, Jinan Central Hospital Affiliated to Shandong University, Jinan 250013, Shandong, P.R. China
  • 6Department of Oncology, Jinan Central Hospital Affiliated to Shandong First Medical University, Jinan 250013, Shandong, P.R. China
* Equal contribution
Received: December 2, 2020Accepted: March 4, 2021Published: May 11, 2021
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.202941

Copyright: © 2021 Tian 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

Due to its effectiveness, cancer immunotherapy has attracted widespread attention from clinicians and scientific researchers. Numerous studies have proven that effective stratification of cancer patients would promote the personalized application of immunotherapy. Therefore, we used the transcriptome data of nearly 1,000 patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) to construct a new immune subgroup. We found that the new immune subgroup, named cluster 2, was a mixture of lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) and lung squamous cell carcinoma (LUSC), and showed poor overall survival, which was further verified in the independent validation set. Immune infiltration correlation analysis showed that the Mast cell type and its status subdivisions had a predictive effect on the prognosis of NSCLC, especially in LUAD. Phenotypic analysis suggested that epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) was positively correlated with immunosuppression, supporting the correlation between tumor phenotype and immune background. Although immune subtypes failed to significantly distinguish the progression-free survival (PFS) of immunotherapy patients, they showed the expected trend; the sample size needs to be further expanded for verification. In addition, some results indicated that the two cancer types, LUAD and LUSC, might require independent analyses.