Identification of a Gene Set Correlated With Immune Status in Ovarian Cancer by Transcriptome-Wide Data Mining

Immune checkpoint blocking (ICB) immunotherapy has achieved great success in the treatment of various malignancies. Although not have been approved for the treatment of ovarian cancer (OC), it has been actively tested for the treatment of OC. However, biomarkers that could indicate the immune status of OC and predict the response to ICB are rare. We downloaded RNAseq and clinical data of OC from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). Data analysis revealed both TMB(high) and immunity(high) were significantly related to better survival of OC. Up-regulated differentially expressed genes (Up-DEGs) were identified by analyzing the gene expression levels. Gene ontology (GO) and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathway enrichment analyses were performed in the “GSVA” and “limma” package in R software. The correlation of genes with overall survival was also analyzed by conducted Kaplan-Meier survival analysis. Four genes, CXCL13, FCRLA, MS4A1, and PLA2G2D were found positively correlated with better prognosis of OC and mainly involved in immune response-related pathways. Finally, TIMER and TIDE were used to predict gene immune function and its association with immunotherapy. We found that these four genes were positively correlated with better response to immune checkpoint blockade-based immunotherapy. Altogether, CXCL13, FCRLA, MS4A1, and PLA2G2D may be used as potential therapeutic genes for reflecting OC immune status and predicting response to immunotherapy.