Department of Medical Oncology, The First Affiliated Hospital, College of Medicine, Zhejiang University, Qingchun Road No.79, Shangcheng District, Hangzhou, 310003, China.
Department of Pathology, Key Laboratory of Disease Proteomics of Zhejiang Province, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Hangzhou, 310058, China.
Cancer Immunol Immunother. 2022 Jan;71(1):121-136. doi: 10.1007/s00262-021-02967-8. Epub 2021 May 24.
Liver cancer accounts for 6% of all malignancies causing death worldwide, and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the most common histological type. HCC is a heterogeneous cancer, but how the tumour microenvironment (TME) of HCC contributes to the progression of HCC remains unclear. In this study, we investigated the immune microenvironment by multiomics analysis. The tumour immune infiltration characteristics of HCC were determined at the genomic, epigenetic, bulk transcriptome and single-cell levels by data from The Cancer Genome Atlas portal and the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO). An epigenetic immune-related scoring system (EIRS) was developed to stratify patients with poor prognosis. SPP1, one gene in the EIRS system, was identified as an immune-related predictor of poor survival in HCC patients. Through receptor-ligand pair analysis in single-cell RNA-seq, SPP1 was indicated to mediate the crosstalk between HCC cells and macrophages via SPP1-CD44 and SPP1-PTGER4 association. In vitro experiments further validate SPP1 can trigger the polarization of macrophages to M2-phenotype tumour-associated macrophages (TAMs).
肝癌占全球所有恶性肿瘤死亡的 6%,其中肝细胞癌(HCC)是最常见的组织学类型。HCC 是一种异质性癌症,但 HCC 的肿瘤微环境(TME)如何促进 HCC 的进展尚不清楚。在这项研究中,我们通过多组学分析研究了免疫微环境。通过从癌症基因组图谱门户和基因表达综合数据库(GEO)获取的数据,在基因组、表观遗传、批量转录组和单细胞水平上确定了 HCC 的肿瘤免疫浸润特征。开发了一种表观遗传免疫相关评分系统(EIRS)来对预后不良的患者进行分层。EIRS 系统中的一个基因 SPP1 被确定为 HCC 患者生存不良的免疫相关预测因子。通过单细胞 RNA-seq 中的受体-配体对分析,表明 SPP1 通过 SPP1-CD44 和 SPP1-PTGER4 相互作用介导 HCC 细胞与巨噬细胞之间的串扰。体外实验进一步验证了 SPP1 可以触发巨噬细胞向 M2 表型肿瘤相关巨噬细胞(TAMs)的极化。