A survival model for prognostic prediction based on ferropto-sis-associated genes and the association with immune infiltra-tion in Lung squamous cell carcinoma

Lung squamous cell carcinoma (LUSC) is the primary pathological type of lung cancer with a less favourable prognosis. This study attempts to construct a ferroptosis-associated signature associated with OS, which can predict the prognosis of LUSC and explore its relationship with immune in-filtration. A 5 ferroptosis-associated genes model was constructed by the LASSO-penalized regres-sion analysis to predict the prognosis of patients with LUSC in the TCGA database and validated in GEO and TCGA databases. Patients were stratified into high-risk and low-risk groups by median value of the risk scores, and the former prognosis was significantly worse (P<0.001). Additionally, we found a certain association between the two risk groups and immune infiltration through CIBERSORT. Meanwhile, the differentially expressed genes (DEGs) between normal and tumor tissue were used to perform functional analysis, which shows significant association with leukocyte transendothelial migration pathways in the TCGA cohort. Besides, immune cell infiltration analysis confirmed that M2 macrophages were significantly highly expressed in the high-risk group. Overall, the model successfully established by ferroptosis-associated genes suggests that ferroptosis may be related to immune infiltration in LUSC.