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Research Paper|Volume 13, Issue 15|pp 19696—19709

Immune cell infiltration-associated signature in colon cancer and its prognostic implications

Dan Deng1,2, Xin Luo1, Sifang Zhang2, Zhijie Xu3,4
  • 1Department of Cardiology, Zhuzhou Central Hospital, Zhuzhou 412007, China
  • 2Department of Integrated Traditional Chinese and Western Internal Medicine, The Second Xiangya Hospital of Central South University, Changsha 410012, China
  • 3Department of Pathology, Xiangya Hospital of Central South University, Changsha 410008, China
  • 4National Clinical Research Center for Geriatric Disorders, Xiangya Hospital, Central South University, Changsha 410008, China
* Equal contribution
Received: February 17, 2021Accepted: July 15, 2021Published: August 4, 2021
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.203380

Copyright: © 2021 Deng 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

Tumor immune cell infiltration (ICI) has been reported in various studies to be correlated with tumor diagnosis, clinical treatment sensitivity and prognosis. It is an important direction to study the characteristics of immune cell infiltration and develop new prognostic markers to improve the treatment of colon cancer. In this paper, we systematically analyzed the ICI characteristics and obtained three ICI clusters. Then, the ICI scores were constructed and its prognostic implications were discussed. From the results, the ICI score patterns were linked to a great survival difference (p<0.001). A high ICI score was characterized by a higher fraction of plasma cells, CD8+ T cells, memory resting CD4+ T cells, monocytes, eosinophils and dendritic cells, which had better prognosis. Macrophages and neutrophils were increased in low ICI score patients with decreased overall survival. Immune checkpoint molecules (PDCD1, CD274, LAG3, IDO1, CTLA-4, TIGHT and HAVCR2) were found to be significantly overexpressed in the low ICI score subgroup. In addition, we also studied the correlation between the tumor mutation burden (TMB) and ICI score. This study indicated the ICI score could serve as a potential prognostic biomarker for colon cancer patients’ immunotherapy.