Lyons Yasmin A, Wu Sherry Y, Overwijk Willem W, Baggerly Keith A, Sood Anil K
1Department of Gynecologic Oncology, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, 1515 Holcombe Blvd, Houston, Texas 77030 USA.
2Department of Melanoma Medical Oncology, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, 1515 Holcombe Blvd, Houston, Texas 77030 USA.
NPJ Precis Oncol. 2017 Aug 15;1(1):26. doi: 10.1038/s41698-017-0031-0. eCollection 2017.
The immune system has many important regulatory roles in cancer development and progression. Given the emergence of effective immune therapies against many cancers, reliable predictors of response are needed. One method of determining response is by evaluating immune cell populations from treated and untreated tumor samples. The amount of material obtained from tumor biopsies can be limited; therefore, gene-based or protein-based analyses may be attractive because they require minimal tissue. Cell-specific signatures are being analyzed with use of the latest technologies, including NanoString's nCounter technology, intracellular staining flow cytometry, cytometry by time-of-flight, RNA-Seq, and barcoding antibody-based protein arrays. These signatures provide information about the contributions of specific types of immune cells to bulk tumor samples. To date, both tumor tissue and immune cells have been analyzed for molecular expression profiles that can assess genes and proteins that are specific to immune cells, yielding results of varying specificity. Here, we discuss the importance of profiling tumor tissue and immune cells to identify immune-cell-associated genes and proteins and specific gene profiles of immune cells. We also discuss the use of these signatures in cancer treatment and the challenges faced in molecular expression profiling of immune cell populations.
免疫系统在癌症的发生和发展中具有许多重要的调节作用。鉴于针对多种癌症的有效免疫疗法的出现，需要可靠的反应预测指标。确定反应的一种方法是评估来自治疗和未治疗肿瘤样本的免疫细胞群体。从肿瘤活检中获得的材料数量可能有限；因此，基于基因或蛋白质的分析可能很有吸引力，因为它们所需的组织最少。目前正在使用包括NanoString的nCounter技术、细胞内染色流式细胞术、飞行时间流式细胞术、RNA测序和基于条形码抗体的蛋白质阵列等最新技术分析细胞特异性特征。这些特征提供了有关特定类型免疫细胞对大量肿瘤样本贡献的信息。迄今为止，已经对肿瘤组织和免疫细胞进行了分子表达谱分析，以评估免疫细胞特有的基因和蛋白质，得到了特异性各异的结果。在此，我们讨论分析肿瘤组织和免疫细胞以鉴定免疫细胞相关基因和蛋白质以及免疫细胞特异性基因谱的重要性。我们还讨论了这些特征在癌症治疗中的应用以及免疫细胞群体分子表达谱分析所面临的挑战。
