Research Paper Volume 13, Issue 12 pp 16696—16712
Identification of an immune checkpoint gene signature that accurately predicts prognosis and immunotherapy response in endometrial carcinoma
- 1 Department of Pediatrics, the Second Affiliated Hospital of Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China
- 2 Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, the Second Affiliated Hospital of Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China
Received: February 8, 2021 Accepted: May 18, 2021 Published: June 22, 2021
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.203189How to Cite
Copyright: © 2021 Li 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
In this study, we performed a bioinformatics analysis to identify immune checkpoint genes (ICGs) associated with prognosis and the immunotherapeutic response in endometrial carcinoma (EC) patients. We classified 47 ICGs into high, medium, and low expression groups by performing RNA-sequencing data analysis of EC patient samples from The Cancer Genome Atlas (n = 521) and GSE77688 (n = 88) datasets. Univariate Cox regression analysis showed that seven ICGs (VTCN1, TNFRSF18, TNFRSF14, TNFRSF4, CD40LG, TMIGD2, and BTLA) were associated with prognosis in EC patients. Spearman correlation analysis showed that prognosis-related ICGs correlated positively with immunotherapy response factors, including tumor mutation burden (TMB), mismatch repair gene mutations, neoantigens, clinical stages, and adaptive immune resistance pathway genes. We identified a prognostic gene signature of four ICGs (IDO1, CD274, CTLA4, and TNFRSF14) that accurately predicted survival outcomes of EC patients. TIMER database and Kaplan-Meier survival analysis showed that OS among EC patients with low TNFRSF14 expression was significantly shorter than among those with high TNFRSF14 expression. In vitro experiments showed that TNFRSF14 silencing increased the migration and invasiveness of EC cells by promoting epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT). Collectively, these findings reveal an immune checkpoint gene signature that accurately predicts survival outcomes and immunotherapeutic responses in EC patients.