A novel T-cell proliferation-related model for predicting the prognosis of head and neck squamous cell carcinoma

Head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) have a poor prognosis since its high rates of metastasis and recurrence. T-cell proliferation-related genes (TRGs) act a significant role in tumor pathology through regulating the function, proliferation of immune cells. We designed and validated an individualized TRGs signature for predicting prognosis in HNSCC patients with risk estimation model. We screened out differentially expressed TRGs (DETRGs) in cancer tissues as opposed to paracancerous tissue. gene ontology and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes pathway analyses were used to investigate the functional involvement of TRGs in the TGCA HNSCC cohort. We constructed a TRG signature using 7 biomarkers which screened by univariate and multivariate analysis and reclassified the HNSCC patients into high- and low-risk group according to prognostic information. After Kaplan-Meier analyzing, we found that patients in high risk was extremely lower in survival than patients in low risk. Combining univariate and multivariate regression analysis, we prove that risk scores is an independent prognostic factor. Further, we explored the immune function and tumor mutation burden (TMB) of our prognostic model. Functional enrichment analyses suggested that TRGs mainly included in the biological pathways related to T-cell and other immune cell response. Different tumor microenvironment, immune cells and TMB can be distinguished clearly according to both risk stratification and subtype clustering. In this study, our team successfully identified specific T-cell proliferation-related genetic biomarkers of HNSCC and established a new prognostic model of HNSCC based on TRGs, which has the outstanding performance in predicting the prognosis of HNSCC.