ABSTRACT
Objectives
The relationship between microbiota and HPSCC recurrence and metastasis remains uncertain. This study aimed to investigate the role of the tumour microbiota in the disease-free survival (DFS) of HPSCC patients.
Materials and methods
Formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) tumour tissues were collected from 103 patients with HPSCC for 16S rRNA sequencing. We analysed the tumour microbiota in HPSCC patients with recurrence/metastasis and nonrecurrence/metastasis. The linear predictor score (LPS) was calculated based on the Cox regression model to assess the risk of recurrence and metastasis. Then, a time-dependent ROC curve was used to evaluate the prognostic power of the LPS.
Results
The phyla Bacteroidota, Firmicutes and Proteobacteria were the most abundant bacterial taxa in the tumour tissues. Eubacterium_coprostanoligenes_group (hazard ratio [HR] = 0.289, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.137–0.608, p= 0.001) and Prevotella (HR = 3.744, 95% CI 1.439–9.738, p= 0.007) were independent predictors of DFS. The predicting classifier for recurrence and metastasis risk yielded an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.838 at 3 years and 0.860 at 5 years.
Conclusion
Our study demonstrated the relationship between tumour microbiota and recurrence and metastasis in patients with HPSCC.
Supplementary material
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/20002297.2022.2146378.
Data availability statement
All raw reads have been deposited in the NCBI Sequence Read Archive (SRA) under accession number PRJNA833656 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/).
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).