Association of Suppressive Myeloid Cell Enrichment with Aggressive Oropharynx Squamous Cell Carcinoma

Authors

Changlin Yang
Rekha Garg
Kristanna Fredenburg
Frances Weidert
Hector Mendez-Gomez
Robert Amdur
Ji-Hyun Lee
Jamie Ku
Jesse Kresak
Stephanie Staras
Andrew G Sikora
Lily Wang
Daniel McGrail
Duane Mitchell
Elias Sayour
Natalie Silver

Publication Date

4-18-2023

Journal

Cancers

Abstract

BACKGROUND: While immune-cell infiltrated tumors, such as human papillomavirus positive (HPV+) ororpharyngeal squamous cell carcinomas (OPSCC) have been associated with an improved clinical prognosis, there is evidence to suggest that OPSCCs are also subjected to increased immunoregulatory influence. The objective of this study was to assess whether patients with clinically aggressive OPSCC have a distinct immunosuppressive immune signature in the primary tumor.

METHODS: This retrospective case-control study analyzed 37 pre-treatment tissue samples from HPV+ and HPV-negative OPSCC patients treated at a single institution. The cases were patients with known disease recurrence and the controls were patients without disease recurrence. An mRNA-expression immune-pathway profiling was performed, and correlated to clinical outcomes. The TCGA head and neck cancer database was utilized to make comparisons with the institutional cohort.

RESULTS: In our cohort, HPV-negative and HPV+ patients with known disease recurrence both had significantly increased suppressive monoctyte/macrophage and granulocyte cell-expression-profile enrichment. Similar findings were found in the TCGA cohort when comparing HPV-negative to positive patients.

CONCLUSIONS: our study demonstrates that patients with recurrent HPV+ OPSCC had suppressive monocyte/macrophage and granulocyte immune-cell enrichment, similar to those seen in the more aggressive HPV-negative OPSCC.

Keywords

head and neck cancer, oropharynx cancer, human papillomavirus, myeloid cell, TCGA

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Associated Data

PMID: 37190274