Conserved methylation signatures associate with the tumor immune microenvironment and immunotherapy response

Aberrant DNA methylation is a major characteristic of cancer genomes. It remains unclear which biological processes determine epigenetic reprogramming and how these processes influence the variants in the cancer methylome, which can further impact cancer phenotypes.

We performed pairwise permutations of 381,900 loci in 569 paired DNA methylation profiles of cancer tissue and matched normal tissue from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and defined conserved differentially methylated positions (DMPs) based on the resulting null distribution. Then, we derived independent methylation signatures from 2,465 cancer-only methylation profiles from the TCGA and 241 cell line-based methylation profiles from the Genomics of Drug Sensitivity in Cancer (GDSC) cohort using nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF). We correlated DNA methylation signatures with various clinical and biological features, including age, survival, cancer stage, tumor immune microenvironment factors, and immunotherapy response. We inferred the determinant genes of these methylation signatures by integrating genomic and transcriptomic data and evaluated the impact of these signatures on cancer phenotypes in independent bulk and single-cell RNA/methylome cohorts.

We identified 7,364 differentially methylated positions (2,969 Hyper-DMPs and 4,395 Hypo-DMPs) in nine cancer types from the TCGA. We subsequently retrieved three highly conserved, independent methylation signatures (Hyper-MS1, Hypo-MS1, and Hypo-MS4) from cancer tissues and cell lines based on these Hyper and Hypo-DMPs. Our data suggested that Hypo-MS4 activity predicts poor survival and is associated with immunotherapy response and distant tumor metastasis, and Hypo-MS4 activity is related to TP53 mutation and FOXA1 binding specificity. In addition, we demonstrated a correlation between the activities of Hypo-MS4 in cancer cells and the fractions of regulatory CD4 + T cells with the expression levels of immunological genes in the tumor immune microenvironment.

Our findings demonstrated that the methylation signatures of distinct biological processes are associated with immune activity in the cancer microenvironment and predict immunotherapy response.