Background
Gliomas are one of the most common types of primary tumors in central nervous system. Previous studies have found that macrophages actively participate in tumor growth.
Conclusion
Our findings strongly support a modulatory role of macrophages, especially M2 macrophages in glioma progression and warrants further experimental studies.
Methods
Weighted gene co-expression network analysis was used to identify meaningful macrophage-related gene genes for clustering. Pamr, SVM, and neural network were applied for validating clustering
Results
Macrophages were identified to be negatively associated with the survival of glioma patients. Twenty-six macrophage-specific DEGs obtained by elastic regression and PCA were highly expressed in macrophages at single-cell level. The prognostic value of MScores in glioma was validated by the active proinflammatory and metabolic profile of infiltrating microenvironment and response to immunotherapies of samples with this signature. MScores managed to stratify patient survival probabilities in 15 external glioma datasets and pan-cancer datasets, which predicted worse survival outcome. Sequencing data and immunohistochemistry of Xiangya glioma cohort confirmed the prognostic value of MScores. A prognostic model based on MScores demonstrated high accuracy rate.