Integrated analysis of immune infiltration in esophageal carcinoma as prognostic biomarkers

Esophageal cancer (EC) is one of the most aggressive and lethal malignancies in the world. The quantity and distribution of immune cells are very important factors in determining cancer. Tumor-infiltrating mast cells (TIM) are a class of immune cells with an important immune regulation function for tumor progression. However, tumor-infiltrating immune cells (TIICs) and their role in EC have not yet been investigated.

The RNA-seq data of an EC cohort were downloaded from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) website. In this study, we used the Cell-type Identification by Estimating Relative Subsets of RNA Transcripts (CIBERSORT) algorithm to compare different soakage of inflammatory cells in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) and normal tissue. Kaplan-Meier survival analysis was performed on different immune cell subpopulations and overall survival (OS) in 22 human immune cell phenotypes. Immunohistochemistry (IHC) was also carried out using our clinical tissue samples.

The proportion of tumor-infiltrating mast cells (TIM) significantly increased at the late of EC and a high percentage of mast cells indicated a poor OS of EC patients in TCGA database. The IHC staining of tryptase revealed that high level of TIM expression was an independent prognostic factor of survival time in the ESCC patients in our database. In addition, TIM accumulation and infiltration of CD8+T cells were shown to be negatively correlated.

This work revealed that TIM are related to prognosis in patients with EC and TIM may be an independent prognostic factor for EC.