Regulatory T-cell Genes Drive Altered Immune Microenvironment in Adult Solid Cancers and Allow for Immune Contextual Patient Subtyping

Background: The tumor microenvironment is an important factor in cancer immunotherapy response. To further understand how a tumor affects the local immune system, we analyzed immune gene expression differences between matching normal and tumor tissue.

Methods: We analyzed public and new gene expression data from solid cancers and isolated immune cell populations. We also determined the correlation between CD8, FoxP3 IHC, and our gene signatures.

Results: We observed that regulatory T cells (Tregs) were one of the main drivers of immune gene expression differences between normal and tumor tissue. A tumor-specific CD8 signature was slightly lower in tumor tissue compared with normal of most (12 of 16) cancers, whereas a Treg signature was higher in tumor tissue of all cancers except liver. Clustering by Treg signature found two groups in colorectal cancer datasets. The high Treg cluster had more samples that were consensus molecular subtype 1/4, right-sided, and microsatellite-instable, compared with the low Treg cluster. Finally, we found that the correlation between signature and IHC was low in our small dataset, but samples in the high Treg cluster had significantly more CD8⁺ and FoxP3⁺ cells compared with the low Treg cluster.

Conclusions: Treg gene expression is highly indicative of the overall tumor immune environment.

Impact: In comparison with the consensus molecular subtype and microsatellite status, the Treg signature identifies more colorectal tumors with high immune activation that may benefit from cancer immunotherapy. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev; 27(1); 103–12. ©2017 AACR.

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