E-MTAB-10886
Development of an immune-related prognostic biomarker for triple-negative breast cancer
Triple-negative breast cancer represents approximately 15–20% of all reported breast cancer cases, and is characterized by a shorter survival time and higher mortality rates compared to other breast cancer sub-types. Tumor microenvironment (TME) refers to the internal and external environment of tumor tissue. Increasing evidence indicates that a tumor's microenvironment is tightly associated with the immunological surveillance and defense during the development of breast cancer. Although oncology studies employing digital dissection methodologies have provided some insight on the biological features of TME, the development of methods to investigate the cellular composition of the tumor microenvironment remain an important research priority. In this study, we extracted whole transcriptome from 30 Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) patients and then used bioinformatics approaches to characterize cell type content in tumor tissue compared with para-cancerous tissue. We identified 4 types of enriched immune cells and 6 types of downregulated immune cells in the tumor tissue samples. After comprehensive bioinformatics analyses, we developed an 'immune infiltration score'  (IIS) to quantitatively model immune cell infiltration in TNBC. To demonstrate the utility of the IIS, we used 2 independent datasets for validation. We found that patients with a higher IIS showing a longer progression-free survival time and significantly better prognosis than those with a lower IIS value. In sum, we explored the immune infiltration landscape in 30 TNBC patients and provided a novel and reliable biomarker IIS to evaluate the progression-free survival and prognosis in the TNBC patients.
Triple-negative breast cancer represents approximately 15–20% of all reported breast cancer cases, and is characterized by a shorter survival time and higher mortality rates compared to other breast cancer sub-types. Tumor microenvironment (TME) refers to the internal and external environment of tumor tissue. Increasing evidence indicates that a tumor's microenvironment is tightly associated with the immunological surveillance and defense during the development of breast cancer. Although oncology studies employing digital dissection methodologies have provided some insight on the biological features of TME, the development of methods to investigate the cellular composition of the tumor microenvironment remain an important research priority. In this study, we extracted whole transcriptome from 30 Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) patients and then used bioinformatics approaches to characterize cell type content in tumor tissue compared with para-cancerous tissue. We identified 4 types of enriched immune cells and 6 types of downregulated immune cells in the tumor tissue samples. After comprehensive bioinformatics analyses, we developed an 'immune infiltration score'  (IIS) to quantitatively model immune cell infiltration in TNBC. To demonstrate the utility of the IIS, we used 2 independent datasets for validation. We found that patients with a higher IIS showing a longer progression-free survival time and significantly better prognosis than those with a lower IIS value. In sum, we explored the immune infiltration landscape in 30 TNBC patients and provided a novel and reliable biomarker IIS to evaluate the progression-free survival and prognosis in the TNBC patients.