Complex immune contexture leads to resistance to
immunotherapy in
hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), and the need for new potential
biomarkers of
immunotherapy in HCC is urgent.
Histone chaperones are vital determinants of gene expression and
genome stability that regulate
tumor development. This study aimed to investigate the effect of
histone chaperones on
tumor immunity in HCC. Bioinformatics analyses were initially performed using The
Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database, and were validated using the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) database and the International
Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) database. Immune-related
histone chaperones were screened with the Spearman rank coefficient. Consensus clustering was utilized to divide the HCC samples into two clusters. ESTIMATE, CIBERSORT and ssGSEA analyses were performed to assess immune infiltration. The expression of immunomodulatory genes,
chemokines and
chemokine receptors was analyzed to evaluate sensitivity to
immunotherapy. The differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were included in weighted gene coexpression network analysis (WGCNA) to identify the hub genes. Enrichment analyses were used to investigate the functions of the hub genes. The Kaplan-Meier method and log-rank test were conducted to draw survival curves. A Cox regression analysis was utilized to identify independent risk factors affecting prognosis. HSPA8 and DEK were screened out from 36 known
histone chaperones based on their strongest correlation with the ESTIMATE score. Cluster 2, with high HSPA8 expression and low DEK expression, tended to have stronger immune infiltration and better sensitivity to
immunotherapy than Cluster 1, with low HSPA8 expression and high DEK expression. Furthermore, WGCNA identified 12 hub genes closely correlated with immune infiltration from the DEGs of the two clusters, of which FBLN2 was proven to be an independent protective factor of HCC patients. HSPA8 and DEK are expected to be
biomarkers for precisely predicting the effect of
immunotherapy, and FBLN2 is expected to be a therapeutic target of HCC.