BACKGROUND

The tumor immune microenvironment is vital to kidney renal clear cell carcinoma (KIRC) progression, and immunotherapies have been shown to be effective in the management of KIRC. However, the prognostic genes associated with the tumor immune microenvironment in KIRC have not been fully identified. We obtained the KIRC RNA sequencing data and the clinical characteristics from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) database. We screened the gene modules associated with the tumor immune microenvironment based on the ESTIMATE algorithm and weighted gene coexpression network analysis (WGCNA). Univariate Cox analysis and the LASSO method were used to construct a prognostic model. Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve analysis was performed to evaluate the accuracy of our risk model. TIMER and Single-Sample Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (ssGSEA) were used to explore the correlation between prognostic genes and immune cell infiltration.

RESULTS

Fifty-four genes in modules were significantly associated with the overall survival (OS) time of patients with KIRC. Furthermore, 12 hub genes were selected to construct the prognostic model. The prognostic model showed superior accuracy in both TCGA and ICGC cohorts using ROC curve analysis. Systematic analysis of immune cell infiltration revealed that nine genes were significantly correlated with levels of tumor-infiltrating immune cells.

CONCLUSIONS

Our findings indicated that the tumor immune microenvironment was an important determinant of KIRC outcomes and revealed potential biomarkers for predicting patient OS and for targeted immunotherapies.