Abstract
Background
Immunotherapy has revolutionised the field of cancer therapy and immunology, but has demonstrated limited therapeutic efficacy in high-grade serous ovarian cancer (HGSOC).
Methods
Multi-omics data of 495 TCGA HGSOC tumours and RNA-seq data of 1708 HGSOC tumours were analyzed. Multivariate Cox regression analysis and meta-analyses were used to identify prognostic genes. The immune microenvironment was characterised using the ssGSEA methods for 28 immune cell types. Immunohistochemistry staining of tumour tissues of 14 patients was used to validate the key findings further.
Results
A total of 1142 genes were identified as favourable prognostic genes, which are prevailing in immune-related pathways and the infiltration of most immune subpopulations was observed to be associated with a favourable prognosis suggesting that tumour immunogenicity was the most prominent factor associated with improved clinical outcomes and response to chemotherapy of HGSOC. We identified multiple genomic and transcriptomic determinants of immunogenicity, including the copy loss of chromosome 4q and deficiencies of the homologous recombination pathway. Finally, an immunological subtype characterised by increased infiltration of activated CD8 T cells and decreased Tregs was associated with favourable prognosis and improved therapeutic efficacy.
Conclusions
Our study characterised the immunogenomic landscape and refined the immunological classifications of HGSOC. This may improve the selection of patients with HGSOC who are suitable candidates for immunotherapy.
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Data availability
The datasets used and/or analysed during the present study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Funding
This study was supported by the Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. LY22C060001). The funders had no roles in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.
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MZ and DPH conceived and designed the study. JS, DPH, CCY, DDX, ZCZ and KL prepared and carried out all analyses, including the development of their statistical framework, and interpreting the data. XBL collected the patient samples and performed immunohistochemical analysis. MZ and DPH drafted the manuscript. All authors participated in the interpretation and discussion of the results and in the version of the manuscript.
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This study was approved by the Ethics Committee of Harbin Medical University and written informed consent was obtained from all the participants.
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Sun, J., Yan, C., Xu, D. et al. Immuno-genomic characterisation of high-grade serous ovarian cancer reveals immune evasion mechanisms and identifies an immunological subtype with a favourable prognosis and improved therapeutic efficacy. Br J Cancer 126, 1570–1580 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41416-021-01692-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41416-021-01692-4
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