Smoking patients with laryngeal cancer screened with a novel immunogenomics-based prognostic signature

Abstract

The immune system greatly affects the prognosis of various malignancies. Studies on differentially expressed immune-related genes (IRGs) in the immune microenvironment of laryngeal squamous cell carcinoma (LSCC) have rarely been reported. In this paper, the prognostic potentials of IRGs were explored in LSCC patients with smoking use. The RNA-seq data containing IRGs and corresponding clinical information of smoking LSCC patients was obtained from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). Differentially expressed IRGs were identified and functional enrichment analysis was used to reveal the pathway of IRGs. Then, IRGs with prognostic potentials in smoking LSCC patients were screened out by univariate Cox regression analysis. Finally, multivariate Cox regression analysis was conducted to assess the prognostic signature of 5 IRGs after adjustment of clinical factors and patients were classified into two subgroups based on different IRGs expression. The prognostic capacity of the model was verified by another independent cohort from Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) database. Nomogram including the prognostic signature was established and shown some clinical net benefit. These findings may contribute to the development of potential therapeutic targets and biomarkers for the new-immunotherapy of LSCC patients with smoking use.