A 14 immune-related gene signature predicts clinical outcomes of kidney renal clear cell carcinoma

Abstract

Kidney renal clear cell carcinoma (KIRC) is the leading cause of kidney cancer-related deaths. Currently, there are no studies in tumor immunology investigating the use of signatures as a predictor of overall survival in KIRC patients. Our study attempts to establish an immune-related gene risk signature to predict clinical outcomes in KIRC. A total of 528 patients from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database were included in our analysis and randomly divided into training (n = 315) and testing sets (n = 213). We collected 1,534 immune-related genes from the Immunology Database and Analysis Portal as candidates to construct our signature. LASSO-COX was used to find gene models with the highest predictive ability. We used survival and Cox analysis to test the model’s independent prognostic ability. Univariate analysis identified 650 immune-related genes with prognostic abilities. After 1,000 iterations, we choose 14 of the most frequent and stable immune-related genes as our signature. We found that the signature was associated with M stage, T stage, and pathological staging. More importantly, the signature can independently predict clinical prognosis in KIRC patients. Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (GSEA) showed an association between our signature and critical metabolism pathways. Our research established a model based upon 14 immune-related genes that predicted the prognosis of KIRC patients based on tumor immune microenvironments.