Correlation Between Immune-Related Genes and Tumor-Infiltrating Immune Cells With the Efficacy of Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy for Breast Cancer

作者：Yan Zhou, Qi Tian, Huan Gao, Lizhe Zhu, Jiao Yang, Jiao Yang, Juan Zhang, Jin Yang, Jin Yang · 发表于：Frontiers in Genetics · 年份：2022 · DOI：10.3389/fgene.2022.905617 · 被引用次数：13 · 研究领域：Cancer Immunotherapy and Biomarkers、Immunotherapy and Immune Responses、Cancer Cells and Metastasis

Background: In the absence of targeted therapy or clear clinically relevant biomarkers, neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) is still the standard neoadjuvant systemic therapy for breast cancer. Among the many biomarkers predicting the efficacy of NAC, immune-related biomarkers, such as immune-related genes and tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), play a key role. Methods: We analyzed gene expression from several datasets in the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) database and evaluated the relative proportion of immune cells using the CIBERSORT method. In addition, mIHC/IF detection was performed on clinical surgical specimens of triple-negative breast cancer patients after NAC. Results: We obtained seven immune-related genes, namely, CXCL1, CXCL9 , CXCL10 , CXCL11 , IDO1 , IFNG , and ORM1 with higher expression in the pathological complete response (pCR) group than in the non-pCR group. In the pCR group, the levels of M1 and γδT macrophages were higher, while those of the M2 macrophages and mast cells were lower. After NAC, the proportions of M1, γδT cells, and resting CD4 memory T cells were increased, while the proportions of natural killer cells and dendritic cells were decreased with downregulated immune-related genes. The results of mIHC/IF detection and the prognostic information of corresponding clinical surgical specimens showed the correlation of proportions of natural killer cells, CD8-positive T cells, and macrophages with different disease-free survival outcomes. Conclusi...