Identification of prognostic immune cells and potential immune-related markers in hepatocellular carcinoma

Background: Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is one of the most common and deadly tumors worldwide. Immunotherapy has emerged as a promising strategy for HCC treatment, and understanding the immune microenvironment of HCC provides a theoretical basis for identifying new immune targets. However, the roles of immune components and their regulatory mechanisms in HCC require further clarified.

Methods: By analyzing HCC expression profiles from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database, we depicted the proportion profile of immune cells for each sample using the software CIBERSORTx. Using R packages, we also characterized the distribution of differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in immune cells, calculated the correlation coefficient between immune cells and common DEGs, and analyzed their biology function by Gene-Ontology analysis.

Results: We found that seven immune cell types were related to the overall survival of HCC patients, and identified 3,692 differentially expressed immune-related genes, predominantly functioning in nucleic acid processing and metabolism. Moreover, 14 DEGs were identified as common candidates related to immune cells and overall survival.

Conclusions: Our study not only presents an overview of the immune features of the microenvironment of HCC, but also provides potential targets related to immune components.