Lung adenocarcinoma accounts for the majority of lung cancer cases and impact survival rate of patients severely. Immunotherapy is an effective treatment for lung adenocarcinoma but is restricted by many factors including immune checkpoint expression and the inhibitory immune microenvironment. This study aimed to explore the immune microenvironment in lung adenocarcinoma via disulfidptosis.
Public datasets of lung adenocarcinoma from the TCGA and GEO was adopted as the training and validation cohort. Based on the differences in the expression of disulfidptosis -related genes, a glucose metabolism and immune response prognostic model was constructed. The prognostic value and clinical relationship of the model were further explored. Immune-related analyses were performed according to CIBERSORT, ssGSEA, TIDE, IPS.
We verified that the model could accurately predict the survival expectancy of lung adenocarcinoma patients. Patients with lung adenocarcinoma and a low-risk score had better survival outcomes according to the model. Moreover, the high-risk group tended to have an immunosuppressive effect, as reflected by the immune cell components, phenotypes and functions. We also found that the clinically relevant immune checkpoint CTLA-4 was significantly higher in low-risk group (P<0.05), indicating that the high-risk group may suffer worse tumor immunotherapy efficacy. Finally, we found that this model has accurate predictive value for the efficacy of immune checkpoint blockade in non-small cell lung cancer (P<0.05).
The prognostic model demonstrated the feasibility of predicting survival and immunotherapy efficacy via disulfidptosis-related genes and will facilitate the development of personalized anticancer therapy.