Identification and validation of a hypoxia-related prognostic and immune microenvironment signature in bladder cancer.

Background: Bladder cancer is the leading causes of cancer-associated mortality and seriously affects population health. Hypoxia plays a key role in tumor development and immune escape, which contributes to malignant behaviors.

Methods: In this study, we analyzed the RNA-seq and clinical information of bladder cancer patients from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database. To investigate the hypoxia-related prognostic and immune microenvironment in bladder cancer, we constructed a hypoxia-related risk model for overall survival (OS). The RNA-seq and clinical data of bladder cancer patients from the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) database were used as validation sets.

Results: The hypoxia-related risk signature was significantly correlated with clinical outcomes and could independently predict OS outcomes. Furthermore, the hypoxia-related risk signature could effectively reflected the levels of immune cell type fractions and the expression of critical immune checkpoint genes were higher in the high-risk group compared to the low-risk group. We also validated the expression levels of the prognostic genes in bladder cancer and paracancerous tissue samples through qRT-PCR analysis.

Conclusion: We established a 7 hypoxia-related gene (HRG) signature that can be used as an independent clinical predictor and provided a potential mechanism in bladder cancer immunotherapy.