Is a Potential Prognostic Biomarker and Correlated With Immune Infiltration Levels in WHO Grade II/III Glioma.

BACKGROUND

Immunotherapy is an effective therapeutic approach for multiple human cancer types. However, the correlations between and patients' prognosis as well as immune infiltration remain obscure. Herein, we employed transcriptomic and clinical data extracted from two independent databases to systematically investigate the role of in the oncological context.

METHODS

The differential expression of was analyzed TCGA and Oncomine databases. We evaluated the influence of on clinical prognosis using Kaplan-Meier plotter. We then used the expression profiler to calculate stromal score, immune score, and ESTIMATE score based on the ESTIMATE algorithm. The abundance of infiltrating immune cells was calculated TIMER. The correlations between expression and immune infiltration levels were analyzed in two independent cohorts.

RESULTS

In patients with World Health Organization (WHO) grade II/III glioma, high expression was associated with malignant clinicopathological features and poor overall survival in both cohorts. expression was positively associated with immune infiltration levels of B cell, CD4+ T cell, neutrophil, macrophage, and dendritic cells (DCs). Besides, expression strongly correlated with diverse immune marker sets. And the predictive power of was better than that of other indicators in predicting high immune infiltration levels in glioma.

CONCLUSIONS

For the first time, we identified the overexpression of in glioma, which was tightly correlated with the high infiltration levels of multiple immune cells as well as poor prognosis. Meanwhile, might be a potential biomarker for predicting high immune infiltration in WHO grade II/III gliomas.