Exploring the relationship between immune heterogeneity characteristic genes of rheumatoid arthritis and acute myeloid leukemia

Background People with autoimmune diseases are prone to cancer, and there is a close relationship between rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and acute myeloid leukemia (AML). The bone marrow (BM) is affected throughout the course of RA, with a variety of hematologic involvement. Hopes are pinned on rheumatoid arthritis research to obtain BM biomarkers for AML. Methods Synovial transcriptome sequencing data for RA and osteoarthritis (OA), and single-cell sequencing data for RA and controls were obtained from the GEO database.Bone marrow sequencing data for AML patients and normal subjects were obtained from the UCSC Xena database. The final immune heterogeneity characteristics of RA were determined through ssGSEA analysis, gene differential expression analysis, fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm, and XGboost algorithm. Random Ferns classifiers (RFs) are used to identify new bone marrow markers for AML. Results SELL, PTPRC, IL7R, CCR7, and KLRB1 were able to distinguish leukemia cells from normal cells well, with AUC values higher than 0.970. Conclusion Genes characterizing the immune heterogeneity of RA are associated with AML, and KLRBA may be a potential target for AML treatment.