Omics-wide quantitative B-cell infiltration analyses identify GPR18 for human cancer prognosis with superiority over CD20

Abstract

Tumor-infiltrating B lymphocyte (TIL-B), and TIL-B-related biomarkers have clinical prognostic values for human cancers. CD20 (encoded by MS4A1) is a widely used TIL-B biomarker. Using TCGA-quantitative multiomics datasets, we first cross-compare prognostic powers of intratumoral CD20 protein, mRNA and TIL-B levels in pan-cancers. Here, we show that MS4A1 and TIL-B are consistently prognostic in 5 cancers (head and neck, lung, cervical, kidney and low-grade glioma), while unexpectedly, CD20 protein levels lack quantitative correlations with MS4A1/TIL-B levels and demonstrate limited prognosticity. Subsequent bioinformatics discovery for TIL-B prognostic gene identifies a single gene, GPR18 with stand-alone prognosticity across 9 cancers (superior over CD20), with further validations in multiple non-TCGA cohorts. GPR18's immune signature denotes major B-cell-T-cell interactions, with its intratumoral expression strongly tied to a “T-cell active”, likely cytolytic, status across human cancers, suggesting its functional link to cytolytic T-cell activity in cancer. GPR18 merits biological and clinical utility assessments over CD20.