A novel pyroptosis scoring model was associated with the prognosis and immune microenvironment of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma.

The phenotype of pyroptosis has been extensively studied in a variety of tumors, but the relationship between pyroptosis and esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) remains unclear. Here, 22 pyroptosis genes were downloaded from the website of Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (GSEA), 79 esophageal squamous cell carcinoma samples and GSE53625 containing 179 pairs of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma samples were collected from the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO), respectively. Then, pyroptosis subtypes of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma were obtained by cluster analysis according to the expression difference of pyroptosis genes, and a pyroptosis scoring model was constructed by the pyroptosis-related genes screened from different pyroptosis subtypes. Time-dependent receiver operator characteristic (timeROC) curves and the area under the curve (AUC) values were used to evaluate the prognostic predictive accuracy of the pyroptosis scoring model. Kaplan-Meier method with log-rank test were conducted to analyze the impact of the pyroptosis scoring model on overall survival (OS) of patients with esophageal squamous cell carcinoma. Nomogram models and calibration curves were used to further confirm the effect of the pyroptosis scoring model on prognosis. Meanwhile, CIBERSORTx and ESTIMATE algorithm were applied to calculate the influence of the pyroptosis scoring model on esophageal squamous cell carcinoma immune microenvironment. Our findings revealed that the pyroptosis scoring model established by the pyroptosis-related genes was associated with the prognosis and immune microenvironment of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma, which can be used as a biomarker to predict the prognosis and act as a potential target for the treatment of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma.