How immune cell infiltration can guide treatment for cervical cancer

CRIG

In a collaboration with several other CRIG researchers, PhD researcher Lien Lippens (of the labs of prof. Hannelore Denys, prof. An Hendrix & prof. Katrien Vandecasteele) has published an article about the potential of tumor-infiltrating immune cells as predictive or prognostic biomarkers for cervical cancer patients.

In short, the researchers immunohistochemically stained pretreatment and posttreatment tissue specimens of 38 cervical cancer patients for several immune cells markers, including markers for macrophages (CD68 and CD163), T cells (CD3, CD4, CD8 and FoxP3) and B cells (CD20), along with IL33 and PD-L1.  Patients were grouped in the low score or high score group based on the amount of positive cells on immunohistochemistry. Correlations to pathological complete response (pCR), cause‐specific survival (CSS) and metastasis development during follow‐up were analyzed and revealed an important predictive and prognostic potential for certain markers, underscoring that the intratumoral IC landscape is a promising tool for prediction of outcome and response to (chemo)radiotherapy.

Read the article via this link.