Research Paper Volume 12, Issue 22 pp 22776—22793
Immune-related biomarker risk score predicts prognosis in prostate cancer
- 1 Department of Urology, Minimally Invasive Surgery Center, Guangdong Key Laboratory of Urology, Guangzhou Urology Research Institute, The First Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China
- 2 Guangdong Key Laboratory of Clinical Molecular Medicine and Diagnostics, Department of Urology, Guangzhou First People's Hospital, School of Medicine, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China
Received: June 6, 2020 Accepted: July 25, 2020 Published: November 10, 2020
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.103921How to Cite
Copyright: © 2020 Liu 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 constructed a model using a Cox proportional hazards model based on the expression of eight immune-related genes that were associated with prognosis in prostate cancer: EDNRB, ANGPTL2, TNFSF15, TNFRSF10D, EDN2, BMP2, NLRP14, and PLK1. We then identified associations between risk scores calculated with the model, tumor microenvironment characteristics, and immune cell infiltration. Prostate cancer patients in the high score group had poorer prognoses, and validation with the external GSE54460 dataset confirmed that the scoring model predicted biochemical recurrence with AUC values of 0.749 at 1 year, 0.804 at 3 years, and 0.774 at 5 years. Proportions of infiltrated M2 macrophages and regulatory T cells were increased in the high risk group, while CD8+ T cells were increased in the low risk group. Network analysis revealed that PLK1 may be a key regulator of the immune-suppressive microenvironment in prostate cancer. Double immunofluorescence labeling of a prostate cancer tissue microarray indicated that PLK1 expression correlated positively with numbers of infiltrating macrophages. These results indicate that an immune- related, gene-based risk score effectively reflects immune microenvironment characteristics and predicts prognosis in prostate cancer.