Identify a DNA Damage Repair Gene Signature for Predicting Prognosis and Immunotherapy Response in Cervical Squamous Cell Carcinoma

Cancer testis antigens: Emerging therapeutic targets leveraging genomic instability in cancer

Cancer care has witnessed remarkable progress in recent decades, with a wide array of targeted therapies and immune-based interventions being added to the traditional treatment options such as surgery, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy. However, despite these advancements, the challenge of achieving high tumor specificity while minimizing adverse side effects continues to dictate the benefit-risk balance of cancer therapy, guiding clinical decision making. As such, the targeting of cancer testis antigens (CTAs) offers exciting new opportunities for therapeutic intervention of cancer since they display highly tumor specific expression patterns, natural immunogenicity and play pivotal roles in various biological processes that are critical for tumor cellular fitness. In this review, we delve deeper into how CTAs contribute to the regulation and maintenance of genomic integrity in cancer, and how these mechanisms can be exploited to specifically target and eradicate tumor cells. We review the current clinical trials targeting aforementioned CTAs, highlight promising pre-clinical data and discuss current challenges and future perspectives for future development of CTA-based strategies that exploit tumor genomic instability.

Assessment of alterations in histone modification function and guidance for death risk prediction in cervical cancer patients

Background: Cervical cancer is the second most lethal malignancy among women, and histone modification plays a fundamental role in most biological processes, but the prognostic value of histone modification in cervical cancer has not been evaluated.

Methods: A total of 594 cervical cancer patients from TCGA-CESC, GSE44001, and GSE52903 cohorts were enrolled in the current study, along with the corresponding clinicopathological features. Patients with a follow-up time less than one month were removed. A total of 122 histone modification-associated signaling pathways were obtained from the MSigDB. The activation scores of these pathways were evaluated using the “GSVA” package, differentially expressed genes were identified by the “limma” package, and pathway enrichment was conducted using the “clusterProfiler 4.0” package. The subsequent least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) regression analysis was performed using the “glmnet” package, and a prognostic nomogram was established using the “regplot” package. For the prediction of potential therapeutic drugs, we used the data from GDSC2016 and visualized them via “MOVICS”.

Results: Nine of 23 histone modification-associated prognostic genes were identified to construct the prognostic signature by LASSO analysis, named the histone modification-associated gene (HMAG) signature. Cervical patients with HMAG-H in TCGA-CESC cohort showed a 2.68-fold change of death risk, with the 95% CI from 1.533 to 4.671 (p < 0.001), as well as the increased death risk of HMAG-H in the GSE44001 cohort (HR: 2.83, 95% CI: 1.370–5.849, p = 0.005) and GSE44001 cohort (HR: 4.59, 95% CI: 1.658–12.697, p = 0.003). We observed the preferable AUC values of the HMAG signature in TCGA-CESC cohort (1-year: 0.719, 3-year: 0.741, and 5-year: 0.731) and GSE44001 cohort (1-year: 0.850, 3-year: 0.781, and 5-year: 0.755). The C-index of the nomogram showed a prognostic value as high as 0.890, while the C-index for age was only 0.562, and that for grade was only 0.542. Patients with high HMAG scores were more suitable for the treatment of CHIR-99021, embelin, FTI-277, JNK-9L, JQ12, midostaurin, PF-562271, pyrimethamine, and thapsigargin, and patients with low HMAG scores were more suitable for the treatment of BMS-536924, CP466722, crizotinib, PHA-665752, rapamycin, and TAE684.

Conclusion: We comprehensively evaluated the histone modification status in cervical cancer patients and revealed histone modification-associated prognostic genes to construct the HMAG signature, aiming to provide a new insight into prognosis prediction and precise clinical treatment.