Deciphering the suppressive immune microenvironment of prostate cancer based on CD4+ regulatory T cells: Implications for prognosis and therapy prediction

作者：Qintao Ge, Zhijie Zhao, Xiao Li, Feixiang Yang, Meng Zhang, Zongyao Hao, Chang Yin Liang, Jialin Meng · 发表于：Clinical and Translational Medicine · 年份：2024 · DOI：10.1002/ctm2.1552 · 被引用次数：63 · 研究领域：Cancer Immunotherapy and Biomarkers、Immunotherapy and Immune Responses、T-cell and B-cell Immunology

Dear Editor, Prostate cancer (PCa) is traditionally considered an immunologically cold tumour characterized by an immunosuppressive tumour microenvironment (TME) and a disappointing response to immunotherapy. Nevertheless, recent studies have demonstrated that the TME of PCa is heterogeneous, and some PCa patients still exhibit “hot tumours” and are sensitive to immunotherapy.1 Our prior works also classified PCa into three phenotypes according to variable immune status and emphasized the important role of regulatory T (Treg) cells in shaping the exhausted TME in PCa.2 In this study, we further conducted an in-depth discussion on Treg cells, and the detailed methods are listed in the Supporting Information Data. A total of 56924 cells from 14 samples with Gleason scores were clustered and annotated into 13 cell types, where the high variable of T cell attracted much attention (Figure 1A–C and Figure S1). We extracted and re-clustered all T cells into 11 clusters (Figure S2A). Referring to published articles, these cells were annotated into six cell populations (Figure 1D–F and Figure S2B), where C3 exhibited the highest Treg score (p < 2.2e-16) and C5 had the highest Th17 score (p < 2.1e-16); we annotated C3 as Treg cells and C5 as Th17 cells (Figure 1G). The ratio of Treg and Th17 is positively correlated with Gleason groups (p = .04, R = 0.65; Figure 1H and Figure S2C), which was also comfited in an external dataset (HRA000823, p = .039, R = 0.56; Figure S3), indicating a p...