Identification of a novel immune microenvironment signature predicting survival and therapeutic options for bladder cancer

Abstract

Few studies have investigated the potential of tumor immune microenvironment genes as indicators of urinary bladder cancer. Here, we sought to establish an immune-related gene signature for determining prognosis and treatment options. We developed a ten-gene tumor immune microenvironment signature and evaluated its prognostic capacity on internal and external cohorts. Multivariate Cox regression and nomogram analyses revealed the prognostic risk model as an independent and effective indicator of prognosis. We observed lower proportions of CD8+ T cells, dendritic cells, regulatory T cells, higher proportions of macrophages and neutrophils in high UBC risk group. UBC tissues with high-risk score tend to exhibit high TP53 and RB1 mutation rates, high PD1/PD-L1 expression and poor-survival basal squamous subtypes, while those with low-risk score tend to have high FGFR3 mutation rates and luminal papillary subtypes. Unexpectedly, we found a highly significant positive correlation between glycolytic genes and risk score, highlighting metabolic competition in tumor ecosystem and potential therapeutic avenues. Our study thus revealed a tumor immune microenvironment signature for predicting prognostic and response to immune checkpoint inhibitors against bladder cancer. Prospective studies are required to further test the predictive capacity of this model.

Construction and External Validation of a Ferroptosis-Related Gene Signature of Predictive Value for the Overall Survival in Bladder Cancer

“…The inactivation of suppressor genes encoding proteins regulating DNA repair or apoptosis may also be one possible mechanism (Williams, 2004). Various immune-related pathways are also reported to contribute to the occurrence of bladder cancer (Wu et al, 2020;Yan et al, 2020).…”

Pyroptosis-Related Patterns Predict Tumor Immune Landscape and Immunotherapy Response in Bladder Cancer

“…While most studies were dedicated to explore a single molecule, the functions and mechanisms of these molecules remain far from satisfactory. Presently, many studies have identified models based on expression profiles to improve the potential value of personalized options for BC ( Yan et al, 2020b ; Yan et al, 2021 ). In this study, we depicted the landscape of these 33 pyroptosis genes at the transcriptional and genetic levels and their correlations in BC.…”

An Immune-Related Clinical-Gene-Risk-Score (CGRS) Prognosis Model for Bladder Cancer

“…A series of immune-related prognostic gene signatures for bladder cancers have been constructed based on the public datasets obtained from TCGA and GEO databases [36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43]. They usually employed the TCGA-BLCA dataset to build the model and then validated it with a single external GEO dataset.…”