NT5E upregulation in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma: A novel biomarker on cancer-associated fibroblasts for predicting immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment

• DOI: 10.3389/fimmu.2022.975847
• Publication Date: 2022-08-26T05:59:40Z
• Authors: Xue-min Chen; Yu-yang Liu; Bing-yan Tao; Xin-miao Xue; Xin-xin Zhang; Lin-lin Wang; Hui Zhong; Jun Zhang; Shi-ming Yang; Qing-qing Jiang
• Keywords: 5'-nucleotidase

Despite tremendous progress made in the diagnosis and managements, head neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSC) remains a global medical dilemma with dismal clinical prognosis high mortality. Gene NT5E encodes ecto-5’-nucleotidase (CD73), which facilitates formation of immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment (TME) permissive for progression various malignancies. Nevertheless, subsets expressed on potential function TME HNSC remain virgin lands HNSC. In this study, we comprehensively performed integrated prognostic analysis elucidated that was an independent indicator HNSC, level predicted poor overall survival (OS), disease-specific (DSS) progression-free interval (PFI) patients ( p <0.05). Enrichment analyses revealed close correlation between ECM remodeling, latent may involve epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) metastasis during progression. HNSC-related immune infiltration single-cell type demonstrated expression significantly positively associated cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs) <0.01). NT5E-related NT5E-high group are characterized by low neoantigen loads (NAL, <0.001) mutation burden (TMB, <0.01), indicating high-NT5E-expression be recalcitrant to immunotherapy. In-situ multicolor immunofluorescence staining later conducted results further verified our findings. Taken together, could novel biomarker Predominantly CAFs, upregulation might predict who benefit little from Targeting CAFs therapeutic strategy patients.