TIMER: A Web Server for Comprehensive Analysis of Tumor-Infiltrating Immune Cells

Abstract

Recent clinical successes of cancer immunotherapy necessitate the investigation of the interaction between malignant cells and the host immune system. However, elucidation of complex tumor-immune interactions presents major computational and experimental challenges. Here, we present Tumor Immune Estimation Resource (TIMER; cistrome.shinyapps.io/timer) to comprehensively investigate molecular characterization of tumor-immune interactions. Levels of six tumor-infiltrating immune subsets are precalculated for 10,897 tumors from 32 cancer types. TIMER provides 6 major analytic modules that allow users to interactively explore the associations between immune infiltrates and a wide spectrum of factors, including gene expression, clinical outcomes, somatic mutations, and somatic copy number alterations. TIMER provides a user-friendly web interface for dynamic analysis and visualization of these associations, which will be of broad utilities to cancer researchers. Cancer Res; 77(21); e108-10. ©2017 AACR.

Figure 1

Overview of TIMER modules on the website. TIMER comprises of six modules. Four modules in the top box are to explore the associations of TIICs with gene expression (Gene), overall survival (Survival), somatic mutation (Mutation) and somatic copy number alteration (SCNA), as well as analysis of differential gene expression (DiffExp) and correlation between two groups of genes (Correlation). Examples visualization for each module are displayed in the corresponding text boxes.