Molecular classification of breast cancer using the mRNA expression profiles of immune-related genes

Abstract

Breast cancer is the most lethal cancer in women and displaying a broad range of heterogeneity in terms of clinical, molecular behavior and response to therapy. Increasing evidence demonstrated that immune-related genes were an important source of prognostic information for several types of tumors. In this study, the k-mean clustering was applied to gene expression data from the immune-related genes, two molecular clusters were identified for 1980 breast cancer patients. The prognostic significance of the immune-related genes based classification was confirmed in the log-rank test. These clusters were also associated with immune checkpoints, immune-related features and tumor infiltrating levels. In addition, we used the shrunken centroid algorithm to predict the cluster of a given breast cancer sample, and good predictive results were obtained by this algorithm. These results indicated that the proposed classification method is a promising method, and we hope that this method may improve the treatment stratification of breast cancer in the future.