Recently, we were intrigued by a recent study by Montironi et al ,1 in which they discovered that an inflamed subclass in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients is associated with a response to immunotherapy. The authors used a 20-gene signature to distinguish these patients and further found different immune infiltration between inflamed and non-inflamed class at the bulk level. We commend the authors for undertaking this study, which holds significant clinical implications. We also observed that Li et al 2 have validated the predictive value of inflamed class in two additional RNA-seq datasets from patients who received anti-PD1 therapy. However, the use of combination immunotherapy, which includes dual immune checkpoint inhibitors or is combined with anti-VEGF agents, has become a growing trend in HCC.3–6 Here, we first performed unsupervised clustering on the RNA-seq data from 289 patients enrolled in the GO30140 Ph1b and IMbrave150 PhIII trials who received a combination of anti-PD-L1 and anti-VEGF therapy7 (figure 1). The results indicated that the subclass (C1), which exhibited high expression of genes associated with B/plasma cells and fibroblasts, had a higher inflamed-class score and better therapeutic efficacy (figure 1B–D). The performance of inflamed-class gene signature in predicting combination therapy response showed anarea under …

中文翻译：

---

扩展炎症类别特征来预测肝细胞癌中基于免疫检查点抑制剂的联合疗法


最近，我们对 Montironi 等人最近的一项研究很感兴趣，1 他们发现肝细胞癌 (HCC) 患者的炎症亚类与免疫治疗的反应有关。作者使用 20 个基因特征来区分这些患者，并进一步发现在总体水平上炎症和非炎症类别之间存在不同的免疫浸润。我们赞扬作者进行这项研究，该研究具有重要的临床意义。我们还观察到，Li 等人 2 在接受抗 PD1 治疗的患者的另外两个 RNA-seq 数据集中验证了炎症类别的预测价值。然而，使用联合免疫疗法（包括双重免疫检查点抑制剂或与抗 VEGF 药物联合）已成为 HCC 的增长趋势。3-6 在这里，我们首先对 289 名患者的 RNA-seq 数据进行无监督聚类参加了 GO30140 Ph1b 和 IMbrave150 PhIII 试验，接受了抗 PD-L1 和抗 VEGF 联合治疗7（图 1）。结果表明，B/浆细胞和成纤维细胞相关基因高表达的亚类（C1）具有更高的炎症类评分和更好的治疗效果（图1B-D）。炎症类基因特征在预测联合治疗反应中的表现显示出以下区域：