Development of a PPP1R14B-associated immune prognostic model for hepatocellular carcinoma

Abstract

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the second leading cause of cancer-related death worldwide. Immunotherapy has been widely reported to have sustained and strong antitumor effects in a variety of tumors with active immune microenvironments, including HCC. PPP1R14B not only involves in the initiation of cancers, but also affects tumor progression and prognosis. However, the roles of PPP1R14B and the associations with immune microenvironment in HCC have not been investigated. RNA-seq and clinical data of HCC was acquired from TCGA database. We mainly focused on the roles of PPP1R14B and the associations with the immune microenvironment in HCC. The results showed that PPP1R14B was significantly increased in HCC samples compared with the control group, and its high expression was significantly correlated with survival outcome, immune status, and response to immunotherapy. We also observed a significant correlation between PPP1R14B expression and chemotherapy drug sensitivity. In addition, we established an immune prognostic model associated with ppp1r14b, which has high predictive power for the prognosis of HCC patients. This study contributes to stratify HCC patients into sub-populations to develop personalized treatment strategy.