Immune Infiltration Analysis by TIMER, quanTIseq, and Cibersort

Abstract

Immune Infiltration analysis is of great significance in cancer research and can provide insight into the activity of the immune system in different disease states. The expression profile analysis of high-throughput sequencing provides a powerful tool for immune cell research, but different methods may lead to different results. This study used a dataset published by Ma et al in August 2023, which included peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) from 19 patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and four healthy human donors. This papper used three immune cell estimation methods (TIMER, quanTIseq, and Cibersort) for analysis, and found differential immune cell proportions from the three methods. To accurately determine the proportion of immune cells, this passage weighted the results of the three methods. The results show that the weighted average method can more comprehensively reveal the presence and distribution of different immune cell types. This provides important insights for immunological research and cancer treatment, underscoring the importance of integrating multiple analytical approaches.