Machine learning-assisted analysis of epithelial mesenchymal transition pathway for prognostic stratification and immune infiltration assessment in ovarian cancer

Background: Ovarian cancer is the most lethal gynaecological malignancy, and serous ovarian cancer (SOC) is one of the more important pathological subtypes. Previous studies have reported a significant association of epithelial tomesenchymal transition (EMT) with invasive metastasis and immune modulation of SOC, however, there is a lack of prognostic and immune infiltration biomarkers reported for SOC based on EMT.

Methods: Gene expression data for ovarian cancer and corresponding patient clinical data were collected from the TCGA database and the GEO database, and cell type annotation and spatial expression analysis were performed on single cell sequencing data from the GEO database. To understand the cell type distribution of EMT-related genes in SOC single-cell data and the enrichment relationships of biological pathways and tumour functions. In addition, GO functional annotation analysis and KEGG pathway enrichment analysis were performed on mRNAs predominantly expressed with EMT to predict the biological function of EMT in ovarian cancer. The major differential genes of EMT were screened to construct a prognostic risk prediction model for SOC patients. Data from 173 SOC patient samples obtained from the GSE53963 database were used to validate the prognostic risk prediction model for ovarian cancer. Here we also analysed the direct association between SOC immune infiltration and immune cell modulation and EMT risk score. and calculate drug sensitivity scores in the GDSC database.In addition, we assessed the specific relationship between GAS1 gene and SOC cell lines.

Results: Single cell transcriptome analysis in the GEO database annotated the major cell types of SOC samples, including: T cell, Myeloid, Epithelial cell, Fibroblast, Endothelial cell, and Bcell. cellchat revealed several cell type interactions that were shown to be associated with EMT-mediated SOC invasion and metastasis. A prognostic stratification model for SOC was constructed based on EMT-related differential genes, and the Kapan-Meier test showed that this biomarker had significant prognostic stratification value for several independent SOC databases. The EMT risk score has good stratification and identification properties for drug sensitivity in the GDSC database.

Conclusions: This study constructed a prognostic stratification biomarker based on EMT-related risk genes for immune infiltration mechanisms and drug sensitivity analysis studies in SOC. This lays the foundation for in-depth clinical studies on the role of EMT in immune regulation and related pathway alterations in SOC. It is also hoped to provide effective potential solutions for early diagnosis and clinical treatment of ovarian cancer.