ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Oncol.
Sec. Gynecological Oncology
Volume 15 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fonc.2025.1588703
This article is part of the Research TopicImmune Predictive and Prognostic Biomarkers in Immuno-Oncology: Refining the Immunological Landscape of CancerView all 33 articles
Immunogenic Cell Death-Related Genes as Prognostic Biomarkers and Therapeutic Insights in Uterine Corpus Endometrial Carcinoma: An Integrative Bioinformatics Analysis
Provisionally accepted
- 1YinZhou Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Ningbo, China
- 2YinZhou third Hospita, Ningbo, China
- 3Ningbo Yinzhou People's Hospital, Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, China
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Immunogenic cell death (ICD) is the phenomenon in which tumor cells undergo the transition from a non-immunogenic state to an immunogenic state upon their demise as a result of external stimuli. In this study, we calculated ICD scores based on 74 ICD-related genes to explore the role of ICD in Uterine Corpus Endometrial Carcinoma (UCEC) progression. We observed that patients with higher ICD scores exhibited a more favorable prognosis, and the score showed a positive correlation with mutation burden (r=0.16, P<0.001). Then we identified 587 upregulated DEGs and 153 downregulated DEGs in high-ICD group compared to low-ICD group. The former was predominantly associated with immune pathways, which was validated in GEO dataset. Using the 64 common DEGs obtained from both TCGA and GEO datasets, we developed a prognostic model specifically tailored for UCEC patients, incorporating five optimal prognostic genes (CD52, SLC30A3, ST8SIA5, STAT1 and TRBC1). Furthermore, the inclusion of clinical factors (stage and ICD score) significantly enhanced the model's predictive ability. The ICD score exhibited positive correlations with immune cell infiltration, as verified by ESTIMATE, xCell, TIMER, MCPcounter, EPIC, and IPS algorithms. Finally, we found that hyper-immunogenicity may be sensitive to immunotherapy and certain drugs (AZD5991, Ibrutinib, Osimertinib, AGI-5198, Savolitinib, Sapitinib, AZ960, AZD3759 and Ruxolitinib), while PCI-34051 and Vorinostat showed sensitivity in patients with hypo-immunogenicity. Overall, our results demonstrate that ICD plays an important role in UCEC progression, suggesting that ICD-related markers could serve as potential targets for prognosis and treatment.
Keywords: Immunogenic cell death (ICD), uterine corpus endometrial carcinoma (UCEC), Immunotherapy, Prognostic model, immune microenvironment
Received: 06 Mar 2025; Accepted: 14 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Yi, Yang, Shen and Huang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Tianfei Yi, YinZhou Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Ningbo, China
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