IMR Press / FBL / Volume 27 / Issue 3 / DOI: 10.31083/j.fbl2703103
Open Access Original Research
KMT2C is a Potential Biomarker of Anti-PD-1 Treatment Response in Metastatic Melanoma
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1 Department of Dermatology, The Affiliated Hospital of Hangzhou Normal University, 310015 Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China
2 Shanghai Center for Systems Biomedicine, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 200240 Shanghai, China
3 Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, School of Basic Medical Sciences, Hangzhou Normal University, 311121 Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China
*Correspondence: liuxinhua@tmu.edu.cn (Xinhua Liu); sczjhzzwy@126.com (Wenying Zhong)
Academic Editor: Graham Pawelec
Front. Biosci. (Landmark Ed) 2022, 27(3), 103; https://doi.org/10.31083/j.fbl2703103
Submitted: 30 December 2021 | Revised: 9 February 2022 | Accepted: 1 March 2022 | Published: 17 March 2022
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Novel Approaches to Cancer Diagnosis and Therapy)
Copyright: © 2022 The Author(s). Published by IMR Press.
This is an open access article under the CC BY 4.0 license.
Abstract

Background: Metastatic melanoma (MM) represents a common malignancy with poor prognosis. Immune checkpoint inhibition (ICI), including PD-1 blockade, has been emerging as the popular therapeutic in MM for its durable treatment effect, but its response rate is still limiting. Methods: We comprehensively analyzed the associations between KMT2C somatic mutation and the tumor microenvironment as well as the ICI response of MM patients based on three published cohorts. Gene differential expression analysis between tumor samples with mutated and wild-type KMT2C was performed by DESeq2 package. Functional enrichment analysis was conducted by using clusterProfiler package. Kaplan-Meier was used to perform overall survival probability estimate through survival package and rms package was applied for the construction of nomogram model. Results: We report here that KMT2C is a potential biomarker for anti-PD-1 treatment in MM. This biomarker can be used for comprehensively analyzing its association with patients’ prognosis, tumor microenvironment and genomic features. Mutations of KMT2C profoundly altered expression of immune- and DNA replication-related genes in MM tumors. MM patients harboring KMT2C mutations showed significantly better overall survival (OS) after treatment with PD-1 monoclonal antibody as compared to wild-type KMT2C. Although KMT2C mutation has no significant influence on immune cell infiltration into MM tumors, the tumor mutation load and neoantigen load are indeed elevated in KMT2C mutated MM samples. This might represent a possible pathway through which KMT2C regulates the response of MM patients to anti-PD-1 treatment. Finally, we constructed a nomogram model by combing the independent prognostic factors, including KMT2C mutation, which could effectively predict the 1-year survival probability of MM patients after anti-PD-1 treatment. Conclusions: In conclusion, we report the role of KMT2C in anti-PD-1 treatment response regulation in MM for the first time. This may consequently be helpful for KMT2C personalized application.

Keywords
metastatic melanoma
immune checkpoint
PD-1
KMT2C
tumor microenvironment
neoantigen
Figures
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