Comprehensive Analysis of Immune-Related Metabolic Genes in Lung Adenocarcinoma

Purpose The immunotherapy of lung adenocarcinoma has received more and more attention. Different immune cells can affect other metabolic genes and lifespan, and cell metabolism directly regulates immune cell functions. Therefore, it is crucial to explore the role of immune-related metabolic genes in lung adenocarcinoma. Methods In this study, we divided immune-related metabolic genes into three categories based on different immune characteristics and researched immune and clinical pathology. LASSO regression analysis was used to screen immune-related metabolic genes, and a clinical prediction model of the screened genes was constructed. Finally, we selected the intersection of immune metabolism genes that are highly expressed in the tumor site and immune metabolism genes that are negatively related to survival, and used qRT-PCR for experimental verification. Results We first screened out immune-related metabolic genes that may affect lung cancer tumor progression, and screened out 9 pivot genes (TK1, TCN1, CAV1, ACMSD, HS3ST2, HS3ST5, AMN, ADRA2C, ACOXL) through LASSO regression analysis and constructed Prognosis model. Finally, through the screening of tumor-related immune metabolism genes, we obtained five pivot genes (HMMR, PFKP, RRM2, TCN1 and TK1). Our qRT-PCR results also show that RRM2 is positively correlated with CDK2, CDK4, CDK6, and CDK8, revealing the close relationship between RRM2 and immune cell tumor infiltration. Conclusion We conducted a comprehensive analysis of the immune infiltration of the tumor microenvironment of lung cancer, and finally determined RRM2 as a promising immune metabolism checkpoint for lung adenocarcinoma based on the high correlation of RRM2 with immune cells and CDK family.