Abstract
BACKGROUND: The prognosis and survival of oligodendroglioma (oligo) patients vary. Although prior research has associated immune cell composition and patient age with survival, the impact of serum-based proteomic profiles on patient outcomes remains unclear. This study examines the association between serum proteomics and immune profiles from peripheral blood and patients’ survival outcomes. METHODS: Patients are a subset of the UCSF Adult Glioma Study, with blood samples collected after surgery. The immune cell compositions of 110 oligo patients were characterized using an immunomethylomic deconvolution algorithm. Serum proteomic data were obtained through the Olink Target 96 Immuno-Oncology panel; cytokines with > 25% missingness were excluded from the analysis. A recursive partitioning analysis (RPA) was applied for identifying survival risk groups using 12 immune cell proportions, 82 cytokines, age, sex, grade at diagnosis, and dexamethasone at the time of blood draw. RESULTS: Of the 110 Oligo patients with a median age of diagnosis of 41 years, 65 (59%) were male, 28 (25%) had grade 3, and 30 (27%) had dexamethasone at the time of blood draw. Patients were partitioned into three survival groups: 40 patients with a high level of MMP7 (>=12.6) and ICOSLG (> 5.9) had a median survival of 17.9 years; 27 patients with a high level of MMP7 and low level of ICOSLG had the shortest median survival of 11.9 years, 43 patients with a low level of MMP7 had the longest median survival of 20.4 years (p < 0.0001). CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggested that MMP7 and ICOSLG may help identify survival subgroups in oligo patients. MMP7 promotes tumor growth, whereas ICOSLG regulates immune activation. Further investigation on a validation set is warranted.