Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jul 16, 2025
Flow Cytometry-Based Isolation and Therapeutic Evaluation of Tumor-Infiltrating Lymphocytes in a Mouse Model of Pancreatic Cancer
Published on: January 17, 2025
Machine learning-based integration develops a metabolism-derived consensus model for improving immunotherapy in
Yongdong Guo1, Ronglin Wang1, Jingjie Shi1
1Department of Oncology, Tangdu Hospital, Air Force Medical University, Xi'an, Shaanxi, China.
Background:
Pancreatic cancer (PAC) is one of the most malignant cancer types and immunotherapy has emerged as a promising treatment option. PAC cells undergo metabolic reprogramming, which is thought to modulate the tumor microenvironment (TME) and affect immunotherapy outcomes. However, the metabolic landscape of PAC and its association with the TME remains largely unexplored.
Methods:
We characterized the metabolic landscape of PAC based on 112 metabolic pathways and constructed a novel metabolism-related signature (MBS) using data from 1,188 patients with PAC. We evaluated the predictive performance of MBS for immunotherapy outcomes in 11 immunotherapy cohorts from both bulk-RNA and single-cell perspectives. We validated our results using immunohistochemistry, western blotting, colony-formation assays, and an in-house cohort.
Results:
MBS was found to be negatively associated with antitumor immunity, while positively correlated with cancer stemness, intratumoral heterogeneity, and immune resistant pathways. Notably, MBS outperformed other acknowledged signatures for predicting immunotherapy response in multiple immunotherapy cohorts. Additionally, MBS was a powerful and robust biomarker for predicting prognosis compared with 66 published signatures. Further, we identified dasatinib and epothilone B as potential therapeutic options for MBS-high patients, which were validated through experiments.
Conclusions:
Our study provides insights into the mechanisms of immunotherapy resistance in PAC and introduces MBS as a robust metabolism-based indicator for predicting response to immunotherapy and prognosis in patients with PAC. These findings have significant implications for the development of personalized treatment strategies in patients with PAC and highlight the importance of considering metabolic pathways and immune infiltration in TME regulation.
