Data from: Identification and validation of a novel immune-related signature associated with macrophages and CD8 T cell infiltration predicting overall survival for hepatocellular carcinoma

Background: Although the effects of macrophages and CD8 T cell
infiltration on clinical outcomes have been widely reported, the
association between immunity-associated gene with them for hepatocellular
carcinoma (HCC) remains unclear. Materials and methods: The ssGSEA served
for quantifying the macrophages as well as CD8 T cell infiltration in the
HCC samples obtained from TCGA database. Kaplan-Meier(KM) survival assay
was used to determine the associations between macrophages and CD8 T cell
infiltration with OS. LASSO Cox regressive method assisted in developing
an immune gene signature as well as building a risk score. The performance
was evaluated by the time-dependent ROC together with the KM survival
analysis. The ICGC database were adopted for external verification.
CIBERSORT was applied to the correlation analysis on the immune-related
signature and the immunocyte infiltration. GSEA were employed exploring
the underlying molecular mechanisms. Results: Increased CD8+ T cell
infiltration was associated with longer OS, whereas a greater infiltration
of macrophages was related to shorter OS. There were 398 differential
expression genes (DEGs) between the high- and low infiltration groups with
the “edgeR” package. A prognostic signature consisted of 10 immune genes
was built in TCGA and examined in ICGC. The uniform cutoff (0.927) was
adopted for separating sufferers into the high-risk(HR) and low-risk(LR)
groups. The ROC curves revealed that the AUC data for this signature
predicting 1,2,3,4 and 5 year were all above 0.7 in both TCGA and ICGC
cohort and patients in the HR group exhibited evidently weaker prognostic
results compared with the LR group. The HR group presented evidently
greater Tregs and Macrophage M0 relative to the LR group, whereas the LR
group saw the enrichment of CD8 T cells. Conclusion: The immune signature
associated with macrophages as well as CD8 T cell infiltration has
reliable prognostic and predictive value for HCC patients.