Systematic Identification of the Cancer Pathways and Molecules Related With Breast Cancer Immunogenicity

Abstract To identify molecular features related to immunogenic activity in breast cancer (BC) and provide new targets and directions for BC immunotherapy. We first used ESTIMATE to evaluate the degree of immune cell infiltration of the BC patients in TCGA and METABRIC, and explore the relationship between the degree of immune cell infiltration and prognosis of breast cancer patients. Then, we identified the cancer pathways, proteins, miRNAs related to BC immunogenicity, and predicted miRNAs target genes and identified the pathways related to target genes with KEGG pathway enrichment analysis. We also explored the correlation between PD-L1 expression level and cancer pathways and found that PD-L1 expression showed a positive association with cancer pathways. In this article we have successfully identified several cancer pathways, proteins, miRNAs and their target genes, which could be as promising new target for BC immunotherapy. And PD-L1 blockade therapy may be more effective in BC patients with the activation of some cancer pathways.