Shanghai Institute of Immunology, Faculty of Basic Medicine, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai, 200025, China.
Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston McGovern Medical School, Houston, TX, 77030, USA.
Nat Commun. 2020 Apr 14;11(1):1779. doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-15679-x.
Immune checkpoint blockade therapies have extended patient survival across multiple cancer lineages, but there is a heated debate on whether cancer immunotherapy efficacy is different between male and female patients. We summarize the existing meta-analysis to show inconsistent conclusions for whether gender is associated with the immunotherapy response. We analyze molecular profiling from ICB-treated patients to identify molecular differences for immunotherapy responsiveness. We perform comprehensive analyses for patients from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and reveal divergent patterns for sex bias in immune features across multiple cancer types. We further validate our observations in multiple independent data sets. Considering that the majority of clinical trials are in melanoma and lung cancer, meta-analyses that pool multiple cancer types have limitations to discern whether cancer immunotherapy efficacy is different between male and female patients. Future studies should include omics profiling to investigate sex-associated molecular differences in immunotherapy.
免疫检查点阻断疗法已经延长了多种癌症患者的生存期，但关于癌症免疫疗法的疗效是否因性别而异，存在激烈的争论。我们总结了现有的荟萃分析，以显示性别是否与免疫治疗反应相关的结论不一致。我们分析了接受 ICB 治疗的患者的分子谱，以确定免疫治疗反应性的分子差异。我们对来自癌症基因组图谱（TCGA）的患者进行了全面分析，揭示了多种癌症类型中免疫特征的性别偏见存在差异的模式。我们在多个独立的数据集进一步验证了我们的观察结果。考虑到大多数临床试验都在黑色素瘤和肺癌中进行，因此荟萃分析汇总多种癌症类型存在局限性，无法确定癌症免疫疗法的疗效是否因性别而异。未来的研究应包括组学分析，以研究免疫治疗中与性别相关的分子差异。
