tigeR: Tumor immunotherapy gene expression data analysis R package

Immunotherapy shows great promise for treating advanced cancers, but its effectiveness varies widely among different patients and cancer types. Identifying biomarkers and developing robust predictive models to discern which patients are most likely to benefit from immunotherapy is of great importance. In this context, we have developed the tumor immunotherapy gene expression R package (tigeR 1.0) to address the increasing need for effective tools to explore biomarkers and construct predictive models. tigeR encompasses four distinct yet closely interconnected modules. The Biomarker Evaluation module enables researchers to evaluate whether the biomarkers of interest are associated with immunotherapy response via built-in or custom immunotherapy gene expression data. The Tumor Microenvironment Deconvolution module integrates 10 open-source algorithms to obtain the proportions of different cell types within the tumor microenvironment, facilitating the investigation of the association between immune cell populations and immunotherapy response. The Prediction Model Construction module equips users with the ability to construct sophisticated prediction models using a range of built-in machine-learning algorithms. The Response Prediction module predicts the immunotherapy response for the patients from gene expression data using our pretrained machine learning models or public gene expression signatures. By providing these diverse functionalities, tigeR aims to simplify the process of analyzing immunotherapy gene expression data, thus making it accessible to researchers without advanced programming skills. The source code and example for the tigeR project can be accessed at http://github.com/YuLab-SMU/tigeR.