Immune Prognostic Implications of PSMD14 and Its Associated Genes Signatures in Hepatocellular Carcinoma

Abstract

BackgroundPSMD14 played a vital roles initiation and progression of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). However, PSMD14 and its-related genes for the immune prognostic implications of HCC patients have rarely been analyzed. Therefore, we aimed to explore gene signatures and immune prognostic values of PSMD14 and its-related genes in HCC.MethodsAnalyzed the expression of PSMD14 in multiple databases, and clinicopathologic characteristics associated with PSMD14 overall survival using Wilcoxon signed-ranktest, logistic and Cox regression, Kaplan-Meier method. An immune prognostic signature (including RBM45, PSMD1, OLA1, CCT6A, LCAT and IVD) was constructed and validated using the co-expression and cox regression analyses in TCGA, ICGC and TIMER datasets and CIBERSORT computational methods. Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (GSEA) was performed using TCGA data set. RT-PCR further validates the expression of seven immune genes in Hepatocellular carcinoma cells.ResultsIncreased PSMD14 expression in HCC was significantly associated with poor prognosis and clinicopathologic characteristics (grade, histologic stage, surgical approach and T stage, all p-values < 0.05 ). A total of six PSMD14-related genes were detected, which markedly related to overall survival and immune infiltrating levels in HCC patients. Using cox regression analysis, the PSMD14 and its-related genes were found to be an independent prognostic factor for HCC survival. Calibration curves confirmed good consistency between clinical nomogram prediction and actual observation. Immune prognostic model suggests that patients in the high‐risk group shown significantly poorer survival than patients in the low‐risk group.ConclusionWe screened potential immune prognostic genes and constructed and verified a novel PSMD14-based prognostic model of HCC, which provides new potential prognostic biomarkers and therapeutic targets and lays a theoretical foundation for immunotherapy of HCC.