Identification of age‐ and immune‐related gene signatures for clinical outcome prediction in lung adenocarcinoma

Abstract Background The understanding of the factors causing decreased overall survival (OS) in older patients compared to younger patients in lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) remains. Methods Gene expression profiles of LUAD were obtained from publicly available databases by Kaplan‐Meier analysis was performed to determine whether age was associated with patient OS. The immune cell composition in the tumor microenvironment (TME) was evaluated using CIBERSORT. The fraction of stromal and immune cells in tumor samples were also using assessed using multiple tools including ESTIMATE, EPIC, and TIMER. Differentially expressed genes (DEGs) from the RNA‐Seq data that were associated with age and immune cell composition were identified using the R package DEGseq. A 22‐gene signature composed of DEGs associated with age and immune cell composition that predicted OS were constructed using Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO). Results In The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA)‐LUAD dataset, we found that younger patients (≤70) had a significant better OS compared to older patients (>70). In addition, older patients had significantly higher expression of immune checkpoint proteins including inhibitory T cell receptors and their ligands. Moreover, analyses using multiple bioinformatics tools showed increased immune infiltration, including CD4+ T cells, in older patients compared to younger patients. We identified a panel of genes differentially expressed between patients >70 years compared to those ≤70 years, as well as between patients with high or low immune scores and selected 84 common genes to construct a prognostic gene signature. A risk score calculated based on 22 genes selected by LASSO predicted 1, 3, and 5‐year OS, with an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.72, 0.72, 0.69, receptively, in TCGA‐LUAD dataset and an independent validation dataset available from the European Genome‐phenome Archive (EGA). Conclusion Our results demonstrate that age contributes to OS of LUAD patients atleast in part through its association with immune infiltration in the TME.