Re-clustering and profiling of digestive system tumors according to microenvironment components

Abstract

BackgroundsImmunotherapy has become the most promising therapy in digestive system tumors besides conventional chemotherapy and radiotherapy. However, only a few patients could benefit from this kind of immunotherapy such as immune checkpoint blocking (ICB) treatment. It is urgent to screening and profiling the subgroups of patients with different responsiveness to ICB treatment.MethodsThis study carried out analysis on digestive system tumor patients from the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) cohorts. The analyses were mainly performed by GraphPad Prism 7 and R language.ResultsWe have quantified the microenvironmental components of eight digestive system tumor patients in TCGA cohort and evaluated their clinical value. We re-clustered patients based on the characteristics of the microenvironment composition and divided these patients into 6 clusters. The difference between these 6 clusters were profiled including survival conditions, enriched biological process, genomic mutation and microenvironment traits. We also evaluated the response heterogeneity in ICB cohorts grouping by microenvironmental factors.ConclusionsCluster 3 was the most immune related cluster with high infiltration of non-tumor components and poor survival status, which was also exhibited an inhibitory immune status. High stromal score could represent cluster 3 and indicated a poor response in ICB cohorts.