AB062. LAG3 gene as a potential prognostic factor and tumor microenvironment remodeling indicator in thymic epithelial tumors: a TCGA data-based study
Abstract

AB062. LAG3 gene as a potential prognostic factor and tumor microenvironment remodeling indicator in thymic epithelial tumors: a TCGA data-based study

Shuning Kong1, Hua Liu1, Feifei Mao2, Jiang Fan1

1Department of Thoracic Surgery, Shanghai General Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai, China; 2Department of Thoracic Surgery, Shanghai First People’s Hospital Clinical Research Institute, Shanghai, China

Correspondence to: Jiang Fan, MD. Department of Thoracic Surgery, Shanghai General Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, No. 100 Haining Road, Hongkou District, Shanghai 200080, China. Email: fan_jiang@sjtu.edu.cn.

Background: Immunotherapy for thymic epithelial tumors (TETs) remains a topic of ongoing debate. To investigate the immune microenvironment of TETs and determine if the immune status correlates with patient survival rates, we utilized The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database. Our goal was to explore the composition of the immune microenvironment in TETs and assess the impact of immune components on patient survival through immune scores, stromal scores, and other relevant metrics.

Methods: We conducted protein-protein interaction (PPI) and COX regression analyses on the differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in the immune and stromal components. By intersecting the results of these analyses, we identified the most significant DEGs. Further, we performed enrichment analysis [Gene Ontology (GO), Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG)] on these DEGs to confirm the associated pathways.

Results: LAG3 emerged as a potential prognostic factor in our study and showed a relationship with myogenesis pathways. We collected patient samples to verify whether LAG3 is related to the extent of TETs and if there are differences between TETs with myasthenia gravis (MG) and TETs without MG. LAG3 was positively correlated with CD8+ T cells, activated NK cells, γδ T cells, naïve B cells, activated dendritic cells, and macrophages by our multi-omics analysis. Then, it was negatively correlated with CD4+ T cells, resting dendritic cells, regulatory T cells, and plasma cells.

Conclusions: Our findings are committed to the LAG3 inhibitor may become a potential treatment option for TETs patients. Using bioinformatics techniques combined with quantitative real-time PCR (Q-PCR) and Western blotting (WB) results from clinical samples, we found that LAG3 could be a potential target for the treatment of thymoma. However, due to the selection of adjacent tissues in clinical samples, adipose tissue was not considered suitable as a control. Therefore, we are trying to conduct the next experimental study on the patients with thymoma combined with lung nodules and lung cancer to use lung samples as the control

Keywords: Thymic epithelial tumors (TETs); immune microenvironment; immunotherapy

Acknowledgments

Funding: None.

Footnote

Conflicts of Interest: All authors have completed the ICMJE uniform disclosure form (available at https://med.amegroups.com/article/view/10.21037/med-24-ab062/coif). The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.

Ethical Statement: The authors are accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved. The study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki (as revised in 2013). The study was approved by Ethics Review Board of Shanghai Pulmonary Hospital of Tongji University (Shanghai, China) (No. K18e137) and individual consent for this retrospective analysis was waived.

Open Access Statement: This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits the non-commercial replication and distribution of the article with the strict proviso that no changes or edits are made and the original work is properly cited (including links to both the formal publication through the relevant DOI and the license). See: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

doi: 10.21037/med-24-ab062
Cite this abstract as: Kong S, Liu H, Mao F, Fan J. AB062. LAG3 gene as a potential prognostic factor and tumor microenvironment remodeling indicator in thymic epithelial tumors: a TCGA data-based study. Mediastinum 2024;8:AB062.

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