Prognosis and immunological characteristics of HDAC family in pan-cancer through integrative multi-omic analysis

Abstract

Abstract Background The histone deacetylase (HDAC) family plays a significant role in a variety of biological processes related to cancer, such as metabolism and cancer progression, and recognized as a target of anti-cancer drugs. Nevertheless, there has been limited systematic research available regarding HDAC family in human cancers using multi-omics approaches. Objective To evaluate the prognostic implications and immunological features of the HDAC family across multiple cancer types through comprehensive multi-omics analysis. Methods We studied the associations of HDAC activity and a variety of factors, encompassing immune checkpoint genes, the tumor microenvironment (TME), instability of microsatellites (MSI), inherited mutations, variation in copy number, tumor mutation burden (TMB), and sensitivity to drugs in a variety of cancer types. Moreover, we analyzed the link between the degree of HDAC activity and the effectiveness of immunotherapy in several cohorts, providing significant details about the possible impact of HDACs on immunotherapeutic responses. Furthermore, we explored potential signaling pathways of HDACs in bladder cancer (BC) using gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA). Immune infiltration analysis in bladder cancer was performed based on HDACs expression, copy number or somatic mutations. Furthermore, the Human Protein Atlas (HPA) dataset has been used to validate the expression of the HDACs protein in BC. Results The HDACs expression exhibits significant heterogeneity across different cancer types and is significantly correlated with patient prognosis, clinical traits, mutations, TME, TMB, MSI, immune checkpoint genes, and objective responses in immunotherapy. The drug sensitivity of cancers was found to be correlated with the gene expression of specific HDAC familial members. In BC, GSEA demonstrates enrichment of multiple immune-related functions and pathways; moreover, there are significant associations between genomic variations in HDACs and the degree of typical immunological cell recruitment. Furthermore, findings from differential expression analysis in BC are validated by protein expression analysis obtained from the HPA database. Conclusions These findings reveal the significance of HDAC family in survival prognosis and treatment guidance of human cancers, and some of them have the potential to be used as immunotherapy biomarkers.