Research Paper Volume 13, Issue 24 pp 26118—26136
Tumor microenvironment characterization in esophageal cancer identifies prognostic relevant immune cell subtypes and gene signatures
- 1 Department of Gastroenterology, The First Affiliated Hospital of Guangxi Medical University, Nanning, China
- 2 Guangxi Medical University, Nanning, China
- 3 Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Guangxi Medical University, Nanning, China
Received: June 1, 2021 Accepted: December 8, 2021 Published: December 26, 2021
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.203800How to Cite
Copyright: © 2021 Zhang 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
Esophageal cancer (ESCA) is a common malignancy in the digestive system with a high mortality rate and poor prognosis. Tumor microenvironment (TME) plays an important role in the tumorigenesis, progression and therapy resistance of ESCA, whereas its role in predicting clinical outcomes has not been fully elucidated. In this study, we comprehensively estimated the TME infiltration patterns of 164 ESCA patients using Gene Set Variation Analysis (GSVA) and identified 4 key immune cells (natural killer T cell, immature B cell, natural killer cell, and type 1 T helper cell) associated with the prognosis of ESCA patients. Besides, two TME groups were defined based on the TME patterns with different clinical outcomes. According to the expression gene set between two TME groups, we built a model to calculate TMEscore based on the single-sample gene-set enrichment analysis (ssGSEA) algorithm. TMEscore systematically correlated the TME groups with genomic characteristics and clinicopathologic features. In conclusion, our data provide a novel TMEscore which can be regarded as a reliable index for predicting the clinical outcomes of ESCA.