Establishment of a prognostic model related to tregs and natural killer cells infiltration in bladder cancer

BACKGROUND: Regulatory T cells (Tregs) and natural killer (NK) cells play an essential role in the development of bladder urothelial carcinoma (BUC). AIM: To construct a prognosis-related model to judge the prognosis of patients with bladder cancer, meanwhile, predict the sensitivity of patients to chemotherapy and immunotherapy. METHODS: Bladder cancer information data was obtained from The Cancer Genome Atlas and GSE32894. The CIBERSORT was used to calculate the immune score of each sample. Weighted gene co-expression network analysis was used to find genes that will have the same or similar expression patterns. Subsequently, multivariate cox regression and lasso regression was used to further screen prognosis-related genes. The prrophetic package was used to predict phenotype from gene expression data, drug sensitivity of external cell line and predict clinical data. RESULTS: The stage and risk scores are independent prognostic factors in patients with BUC. Mutations in FGFR3 lead to an increase in Tregs percolation and affect the prognosis of the tumor, and additionally, EMP1, TCHH and CNTNAP3B in the model are mainly positively correlated with the expression of immune checkpoints, while CMTM8, SORT1 and IQSEC1 are negatively correlated with immune checkpoints and the high-risk group had higher sensitivity to chemotherapy drugs. CONCLUSION: Prognosis-related models of bladder tumor patients, based on Treg and NK cell percolation in tumor tissue. In addition to judging the prognosis of patients with bladder cancer, it can also predict the sensitivity of patients to chemotherapy and immunotherapy. At the same time, patients were divided into high and low risk groups based on this model, and differences in genetic mutations were found between the high and low risk groups.