Abstract
Glycolysis has a major role in cancer progression and can affect the tumor immune microenvironment, while its specific role in lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) remains poorly studied. We obtained publicly available data from The Cancer Genome Atlas and Gene Expression Omnibus databases and used R software to analyze the specific role of glycolysis in LUAD. The Single Sample Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (ssGSEA) indicated a correlation between glycolysis and unfavorable clinical outcome, as well as a repression effect on the immunotherapy response of LUAD patients. Pathway enrichment analysis revealed a significant enrichment of MYC targets, epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT), hypoxia, G2M checkpoint, and mTORC1 signaling pathways in patients with higher activity of glycolysis. Immune infiltration analysis showed a higher infiltration of M0 and M1 macrophages in patients with elevated activity of glycolysis. Moreover, we developed a prognosis model based on six glycolysis-related genes, including DLGAP5, TOP2A, KIF20A, OIP5, HJURP, and ANLN. Both the training and validation cohorts demonstrated the high efficiency of prognostic prediction in this model, which identified that patients with high risk may have a poorer prognosis and lower sensitivity to immunotherapy. Additionally, we also found that Th2 cell infiltration may predict poorer survival and resistance to immunotherapy. The study indicated that glycolysis is significantly associated with poor prognosis in patients with LUAD and immunotherapy resistance, which might be partly dependent on the Th2 cell infiltration. Additionally, the signature comprised of six genes related to glycolysis showed promising predictive value for LUAD prognosis.
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Data availability
The data used to support the results of the present work are available at TCGA database (https://tcga-data.nci.nih.gov/tcga/), GEO (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/), and GSEA (http://www.gsea-msigdb.org/gsea/index.jsp).
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Funding
This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (82260581), Hunan Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (2022JJ50291), Scientific Research Fund of Hunan Provincial Education Department (22B1038), and Hunan University of Medicine Scientific Research incubator construction project (2022).
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LZ and XF write this manuscript. LL, SX, and CD participated in software, resource, and validation. TZ participated in the analysis. TL and ZF participated in the conception, supervision, revising, and writing the manuscript.
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Tian Li is an editorial member of Funct Integr Genomics and declares no COIs. Other authors declare that no conflicts of interest in this work.
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Zeng, L., Liang, L., Fang, X. et al. Glycolysis induces Th2 cell infiltration and significantly affects prognosis and immunotherapy response to lung adenocarcinoma. Funct Integr Genomics 23, 221 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10142-023-01155-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10142-023-01155-4