Could Function as a Prognostic Marker and Correlate with Immune Infiltration in Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma.

OBJECTIVE

We aim to investigate the correlation between mRNA level and prognosis of head and neck squamous cancer (HNSC) in public databases. In addition, we investigated the correlation between expression and clinicopathological characteristics and tumor-infiltrating immune cells in HNSC patients.

METHODS

mRNA expression in multiple cancers was analyzed based on Gene Expression Profiling Interactive Analysis. A protein-protein interaction network was obtained based on the STRING database. The 10 proteins most closely related to FCGR2A (i.e., CD3G, PLCG2, LAT, LYN, SYK, FCGR3A, PIK3R1, HCK, ITGAM, and ITGB2) were screened, followed by establishing the protein-protein interaction network. The correlation between expression and immunocytes was investigated, together with the effects of FCGR2A on the metastasis, recurrence, and survival of HNSC.

RESULTS

expression in several carcinoma tissues was significantly higher than that of adjacent tissues. Significant differences were noticed in the HNSC samples and the adjacent tissue samples except the seven samples of grade 4. There were statistical differences between the expression in tissues of grade 1, grade 2, and grade 3 ( < 0.05). In the tissues of grade 4, the expression of FCGR2A was the lowest. The FCGR2A protein was a type of II-a receptor in Fc of the low-affinity immunoglobulin, which could bind with the Fc region of the immunoglobulin . There was a correlation between the gene and the distal HNSC metastasis. gene expression was correlated with the survival and prognosis. The GSE65858 dataset was selected for the validation. The expression was significantly correlated with total survival ( = 0.0107) and progression-free survival ( = 0.0362).

CONCLUSIONS

Our findings shed light on the importance of in HNSC and illustrated a potential relationship between and tumor-immune interactions.