Uveal melanoma (UM) is the most common primary intraocular
tumor with high
metastasis and poor prognosis among adults.
Hypoxia participates in the
metastasis process in various types of
cancers. It is reported that the increased expression of
hypoxia inducible factor 1 alpha subunit (HIF1A), a
hypoxia-related molecule, is associated with worse prognoses of UM patients. Based on the integrated analysis of single-cell sequencing (
scRNA-seq) dataset from Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) and bulk
RNA-seq dataset from the
Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), we found
hypoxia was the key feature in UM progression and identified 47 common
hypoxia-related differentially expressed genes (DEGs) for the following research. Univariate cox analysis and LASSO-Cox regression analysis were performed to establish a nine-gene prognostic model. According to this model, UM patients could be divided into high- and low-risk groups, with a significant difference in overall survival and progression free survival between the two groups (P < 0.001). The accuracy of the predictive model was also verified on two other independent datasets. In addition, Gene Ontology (GO) and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathway enrichment analyses revealed that these
hypoxia-related DEGs were enriched in immune and
cancer related pathways. The proportion of immune infiltration and the expression of immune
biomarkers were different between high- and low-risk UM patients, providing potential targets for UM
immunotherapy. Hence, our
hypoxia-related nine-gene model could efficiently predict the prognosis and guide personalized
therapies for UM patients.