Tumor Immune Estimation Resource (TIMER) Database and Tumor-Immune System Interactions Database (TISIDB) Analysis

TIMER is a comprehensive resource for investigating the interactions between genes of interest and tumor immune interactions in more than 30 types of cancer (https://cistrome.shinyapps.io/timer/) (24). It has incorporated 10,897 samples across 32 types of cancer from TCGA to estimate the abundance of immune infiltrates. The TISIDB is a web portal for the analysis of tumor and immune system interaction; it integrates heterogeneous data types, including literature mining results from the PubMed database, high-throughput screening data, RNA sequencing data of patients with immunotherapy, and TCGA (25). In the present study, we investigated the correlation of TBK1 expression with tumor immune infiltration using TIMER and with tumoral activated CD8⁺ T cells through the TISIDB in the HCC data set. The abundance profile of tumor-infiltrating immune cells in HCC samples from TCGA was calculated using the CIBERSORT computational method (26).