The landscape and prognostic value of immune characteristics in uterine corpus endometrial cancer

Abstract

Abstract In the present study, we explored the clinical and immunological characteristics of 575 uterine corpus endometrial carcinoma (UCEC) samples obtained from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) using the ESTIMATE and CIBERSORT algorithms. First, Kaplan–Meier and univariate Cox regression analyses indicated that the immune cell score was a prognostic factor for overall survival (OS) and recurrence-free survival (RFS). Multivariate Cox regression analysis further revealed that the immune cell score was an independent prognostic factor for UCEC patients. Second, we investigated the correlation between the infiltration levels of 22 types of immune cells and the immune score. Survival analysis based on the 22 immune cell types showed that higher levels of regulatory T cell, activated NK cell, and follicular helper T-cell infiltration were associated with longer OS, while higher levels of CD8+ T cell and naive B-cell infiltration were associated with longer RFS. Next, we performed differential expression and prognosis analyses on 1534 immune-related genes and selected five from 14 candidate genes to construct a prognostic prediction model. The area under the receiver-operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC) for 3- and 5-year survival were 0.711 and 0.728, respectively. Further validation using a stage I–II subgroup showed similar results, presenting AUC values for 3- and five-year survival of 0.677 and 0.692, respectively. Taken together, the present study provides not only a deeper understanding of the relationship between UCEC and the immune landscape but also guidance for the future development of UCEC immunotherapy.