Identification of a prognostic six-immune-gene signature and a nomogram model for uveal melanoma

BACKGROUND: To identify an immune-related prognostic signature and find potential therapeutic targets for uveal melanoma. METHODS: The RNA-sequencing data obtained from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) datasets. The prognostic six-immune-gene signature was constructed through least absolute shrinkage and selection operator and multi-variate Cox regression analyses. Functional enrichment analysis and single sample GSEA were carried out. In addition, a nomogram model established by integrating clinical variables and this signature risk score was also constructed and evaluated. RESULTS: We obtained 130 prognostic immune genes, and six of them were selected to construct a prognostic signature in the TCGA uveal melanoma dataset. Patients were classified into high-risk and low-risk groups according to a median risk score of this signature. High-risk group patients had poorer overall survival in comparison to the patients in the low-risk group (p < 0.001). These findings were further validated in two external GEO datasets. A nomogram model proved to be a good classifier for uveal melanoma by combining this signature. Both functional enrichment analysis and single sample GSEA analysis verified that this signature was truly correlated with immune system. In addition, in vitro cell experiments results demonstrated the consistent trend of our computational findings. CONCLUSION: Our newly identified six-immune-gene signature and a nomogram model could be used as meaningful prognostic biomarkers, which might provide uveal melanoma patients with individualized clinical prognosis prediction and potential novel treatment targets. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12886-022-02723-1.