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Updated: Nov 3, 2025
Author Spotlight: Investigating Immune Cell Dynamics in the Tumor Microenvironment — Challenges and Innovations in Cancer Prognosis
Published on: April 12, 2024
Prognostic and predictive significance of the tumor microenvironment in hepatocellular carcinoma
Jibing Liu1,1, Shuwen Kuang2,1, Yiling Zheng2
1Department of Interventional Surgical Oncology, Cancer Hospital of Shandong Province, Shandong Academy of Medical Sciences, Jinan, Shandong, China.
Background:
Identification of molecular markers that reflect the characteristics of the tumor microenvironment (TME) may be beneficial to predict the prognosis of post-operative hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients.
Objective And Methods:
A total of 100 tissue samples from HCC patients were separately stained by immunohistochemistry to examine the expression levels of CD56, CD8α, CD68, FoxP3, CD31 and pan-Keratin. The prognostic values were analyzed by Cox regression and the Kaplan-Meier method.
Results:
Univariate and multivariate logistic analysis showed that FoxP3 was the independent factor associated with microvascular invasion (MVI), tumor size and envelop invasion; CD68 was associated with envelope invasion and AFP. Kaplan-Meier survival curves revealed that CD68 and FoxP3 expression were significantly associated with relapse free survival (RFS) of HCC patients (P< 0.05). The ROC curve indicated that the combination of tumor number, MVI present and CD68 expression yielded a ROC curve area of 82.3% (86.36% specificity, 68.75% sensitivity) to evaluate the prognosis of HCC patients, which was higher than the classifier established by the combination of tumor number and MVI (78.8% probability, 63.64% specificity and 85.42% sensitivity).
Conclusions:
Our study indicated that CD68 and FoxP3 are associated with prognosis of HCC patients, and CD68 can be considered as a potential prognostic and predictive biomarker.
