The Prognostic Value of the DNA Repair Gene Signature in Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma

Abstract

PurposeTo construct a prognostic signature composed of DNA repair genes to effectively predict the prognosis of patients with head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC).MethodsAfter downloading the transcriptome and clinical data of HNSCC from the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), 499 patients with HNSCC were equally divided into training and testing sets. In the training set, 13 DNA repair genes were screened using univariate proportional hazard (Cox) regression analysis and least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) Cox regression analysis to construct a risk model, which was validated in the testing set.ResultsIn the training and testing sets, there were significant differences in the clinical outcomes of patients in the high- and low-risk groups showed by Kaplan-Meier survival curves (P < 0.001). Univariate and multivariate Cox regression analyses showed that the risk score had independent prognostic predictive ability (P < 0.001). At the same time, the immune cell infiltration, immune score, immune-related gene expression, and tumor mutation burden (TMB) of patients with HNSCC were also different between the high- and low-risk groups (P < 0.05). Finally, we screened several chemotherapeutics for HNSCC, which showed significant differences in drug sensitivity between the high- and low-risk groups (P < 0.05).ConclusionThis study constructed a 13-DNA-repair-gene signature for the prognosis of HNSCC, which could accurately and independently predict the clinical outcome of the patient. We then revealed the immune landscape, TMB, and sensitivity to chemotherapy drugs in different risk groups, which might be used to guide clinical treatment decisions.

Integrative analysis of multi-omics data for discovery of ferroptosis-related gene signature predicting immune activity in neuroblastoma

“…Furthermore, we found that the lowrisk group was more activated as a whole in tracking the analysis of the tumor immunophenotype, except step 1 release of cancer cell antigens and step 6 recognition of cancer cells by T cells (Liwen et al, 2018). Furthermore, the low-risk group had a higher expression of immune checkpoints and markers, such as PD-L1 and HLA-ABC, which is similar to several reports by Ming et al (2021). Therefore, the results have supposed that patients in the low-risk group would benefit more from immune checkpoint blocking therapy.…”