Abstract
BACKGROUND: Immunotherapy is an effective therapeutic approach for multiple human cancer types. However, the correlations between EVA1C and patients' prognosis as well as immune infiltration remain obscure. Herein, we employed transcriptomic and clinical data extracted from two independent databases to systematically investigate the role of EVA1C in the oncological context. METHODS: The differential expression of EVA1C was analyzed via TCGA and Oncomine databases. We evaluated the influence of EVA1C on clinical prognosis using Kaplan-Meier plotter. We then used the expression profiler to calculate stromal score, immune score, and ESTIMATE score based on the ESTIMATE algorithm. The abundance of infiltrating immune cells was calculated via TIMER. The correlations between EVA1C expression and immune infiltration levels were analyzed in two independent cohorts. RESULTS: In patients with World Health Organization (WHO) grade II/III glioma, high EVA1C expression was associated with malignant clinicopathological features and poor overall survival in both cohorts. EVA1C expression was positively associated with immune infiltration levels of B cell, CD4+ T cell, neutrophil, macrophage, and dendritic cells (DCs). Besides, EVA1C expression strongly correlated with diverse immune marker sets. And the predictive power of EVA1C was better than that of other indicators in predicting high immune infiltration levels in glioma. CONCLUSIONS: For the first time, we identified the overexpression of EVA1C in glioma, which was tightly correlated with the high infiltration levels of multiple immune cells as well as poor prognosis. Meanwhile, EVA1C might be a potential biomarker for predicting high immune infiltration in WHO grade II/III gliomas.