Wang Yongwei, Guo Sen, Chen Zhihong, Bai Bing, Wang Shuo, Gao Yaxian
Department of Anatomy, Basic Medical Institute, Chengde Medical College, Chengde, China.
Department of Immunology, Basic Medical Institute, Chengde Medical College, Chengde, China.
Front Oncol. 2021 Feb 10;10:607742. doi: 10.3389/fonc.2020.607742. eCollection 2020.
Immunotherapy has become the most promising therapy in digestive system tumors besides conventional chemotherapy and radiotherapy. But only a few patients can benefit from different types of immunotherapies, such as immune checkpoint blockade (ICB). To identify these ICB-susceptible patients, methods are urgently needed to screen and profile subgroups of patients with different responsiveness to ICB.
This study carried out analysis on patients with digestive system tumors that were obtained from Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) cohorts. The analyses were mainly performed using GraphPad Prism 7 and R language.
We have quantified the microenvironmental components of eight digestive system tumor patients in TCGA cohorts and evaluated their clinical value. We re-clustered patients based on their microenvironment composition and divided these patients into six clusters. The differences between these six clusters were profiled, including survival conditions, enriched biological processes, genomic mutations, and microenvironment traits. Cluster 3 was the most immune-related cluster, exhibiting a high infiltration of non-tumor components and poor survival status, along with an inhibitory immune status, and we found that patients with high stromal score indicated a poor response in ICB cohort.
Our research provides a new strategy based on the microenvironment components for the reclassification of digestive system tumors, which could provide guidance for prognosis judgment and treatment response prediction like ICB.
免疫疗法已成为消化系统肿瘤中除传统化疗和放疗之外最具前景的治疗方法。但只有少数患者能从不同类型的免疫疗法中获益，如免疫检查点阻断（ICB）。为了识别这些对ICB敏感的患者，迫切需要方法来筛选和描绘对ICB反应不同的患者亚组。
本研究对从癌症基因组图谱（TCGA）队列中获取的消化系统肿瘤患者进行了分析。分析主要使用GraphPad Prism 7和R语言进行。
我们对TCGA队列中8例消化系统肿瘤患者的微环境成分进行了量化，并评估了其临床价值。我们根据患者的微环境组成重新聚类，将这些患者分为6个簇。描绘了这6个簇之间的差异，包括生存状况、富集的生物学过程、基因组突变和微环境特征。簇3是与免疫最相关的簇，表现出非肿瘤成分的高浸润和较差的生存状态，以及免疫抑制状态，并且我们发现基质评分高的患者在ICB队列中反应较差。
我们的研究基于微环境成分提供了一种用于消化系统肿瘤重新分类的新策略，这可为预后判断和如ICB治疗反应预测提供指导。
