AUTHOR=Hu Zhicheng , Qu Shanqiang 

TITLE=EVA1C Is a Potential Prognostic Biomarker and Correlated With Immune Infiltration Levels in WHO Grade II/III Glioma

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Immunology

VOLUME=12

YEAR=2021

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/immunology/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2021.683572

DOI=10.3389/fimmu.2021.683572

ISSN=1664-3224

ABSTRACT=<sec><title>Background</title><p>Immunotherapy is an effective therapeutic approach for multiple human cancer types. However, the correlations between <italic>EVA1C</italic> and patients’ prognosis as well as immune infiltration remain obscure. Herein, we employed transcriptomic and clinical data extracted from two independent databases to systematically investigate the role of <italic>EVA1C</italic> in the oncological context.</p></sec><sec><title>Methods</title><p>The differential expression of <italic>EVA1C</italic> was analyzed <italic>via</italic> TCGA and Oncomine databases. We evaluated the influence of <italic>EVA1C</italic> on clinical prognosis using Kaplan-Meier plotter. We then used the expression profiler to calculate stromal score, immune score, and ESTIMATE score based on the ESTIMATE algorithm. The abundance of infiltrating immune cells was calculated <italic>via</italic> TIMER. The correlations between <italic>EVA1C</italic> expression and immune infiltration levels were analyzed in two independent cohorts.</p></sec><sec><title>Results</title><p>In patients with World Health Organization (WHO) grade II/III glioma, high <italic>EVA1C</italic> expression was associated with malignant clinicopathological features and poor overall survival in both cohorts. <italic>EVA1C</italic> expression was positively associated with immune infiltration levels of B cell, CD4+ T cell, neutrophil, macrophage, and dendritic cells (DCs). Besides, <italic>EVA1C</italic> expression strongly correlated with diverse immune marker sets. And the predictive power of <italic>EVA1C</italic> was better than that of other indicators in predicting high immune infiltration levels in glioma.</p></sec><sec><title>Conclusions</title><p>For the first time, we identified the overexpression of <italic>EVA1C</italic> in glioma, which was tightly correlated with the high infiltration levels of multiple immune cells as well as poor prognosis. Meanwhile, <italic>EVA1C</italic> might be a potential biomarker for predicting high immune infiltration in WHO grade II/III gliomas.</p></sec>