The cancer-associated fibroblast-related signature predicts prognosis and indicates immune microenvironment infiltration in gastric cancer.

BACKGROUND

Gastric cancer (GC) is one of the most common cancers, with a wide range of symptoms and outcomes. Cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs) are newly identified in the tumor microenvironment (TME) and associated with GC progression, prognosis, and treatment response. A novel CAF-associated prognostic model is urgently needed to improve treatment strategies.

METHODS

The detailed data of GC samples were downloaded from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), GSE62254, GSE26253, and GSE84437 datasets, then obtained 18 unique CAF-related genes from the research papers. Eight hundred eight individuals with GC were classified as TCGA or GSE84437 using consensus clustering by the selected CAF-related genes. The difference between the two subtypes revealed in this study was utilized to create the "CAF-related signature score" (CAFS-score) prognostic model and validated with the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) database.

RESULTS

We identified two CAF subtypes characterized by high and low CAFS-score in this study. GC patients in the low CAFS-score group had a better OS than those in the high CAFS-score group, and the cancer-related malignant pathways were more active in the high CAFS-score group, compared to the low CAFS-score group. We found that there was more early TNM stage in the low CAFS-score subgroup, while there was more advanced TNM stage in the high CAFS-score subgroup. The expression of TMB was significantly higher in the low CAFS-score subgroup than in the high CAFS-score subgroup. A low CAFS-score was linked to increased microsatellite instability-high (MSI-H), mutation load, and immunological activation. Furthermore, the CAFS-score was linked to the cancer stem cell (CSC) index as well as chemotherapeutic treatment sensitivity. The patients in the high CAFS-score subgroup had significantly higher proportions of monocytes, M2 macrophages, and resting mast cells, while plasma cells and follicular helper T cells were more abundant in the low-risk subgroup. The CAFS-score was also highly correlated with the sensitivity of chemotherapeutic drugs. The low CAFS-score group was more likely to have an immune response and respond to immunotherapy. We developed a nomogram to improve the CAFS-clinical score's usefulness.

CONCLUSION

The CAFS-score may have a significant role in the TME, clinicopathological characteristics, prognosis, CSC, MSI, and drug sensitivity, according to our investigation of CAFs in GC. We also analyzed the value of the CAFS-score in immune response and immunotherapy. This work provides a foundation for improving prognosis and responding to immunotherapy in patients with GC.