Identification of an immune-related signature for the prognosis of uveal melanoma

AIM: To construct an immune-related prognostic signature (IPS) that can distinguish and predict prognosis in uveal melanoma (UM). METHODS: The transcriptomic data and clinicopathological information of 80 UM patients were extracted from the TCGA database. These patients were randomly assigned to a training and a testing set. RESULTS: Lasso Cox analysis was performed for the prognostic immune-related genes to develop an IPS for UM in the training set. The signature was validated in both the testing set and entire cohort. We confirmed the prognostic value of our IPS in distinct subgroups and found its association with the T stage and basal diameter of the tumor. Tumor Immune Estimation Resource database analysis revealed that the IPS was negatively correlated with the infiltration of neutrophils and dendritic cells, but positively correlated with the infiltration level of CD8+ T cells. In addition, we demonstrated that immune checkpoints containing PD-1, CTLA-4, 100, and TIGIT were moderately associated with the IPS. CONCLUSION: This is the first study to develop and validate an immune-related signature with the ability of predicting prognosis for UM patients. Further studies are needed to validate its prediction accuracy.