Huang Rong, Su Xinyu, Wang Jiayu, Sun Qi, Kang Donglin, Li Lin, Wu Yirong, Zhao Lianjun, Xie Ziyao, Zou Zhengyun
Department of the Comprehensive Cancer Center, Nanjing Drum Tower Hospital, Affiliated Hospital of Medical School, Nanjing University, Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, China.
Department of the Comprehensive Cancer Center, Nanjing Drum Tower Hospital Clinical College of Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine, Nanjing, China.
J Immunother Cancer. 2025 Jul 15;13(7):e011097. doi: 10.1136/jitc-2024-011097.
Intratumoral fungi have recently been implicated in cancer initiation and progression, with potential as biomarkers for predicting clinical outcomes and treatment response in patients with cancer. However, their role in acral melanoma (AM) has not been previously explored.
We characterized the mycobiome in AM tumor tissues and adjacent non-tumor tissues. Differences in fungal communities between the two tissues, as well as the prognostic and diagnostic potential of intratumoral fungi, and their associations with the tumor microenvironment and clinicopathologic features, were evaluated through bioinformatics and biostatistical analyses.
Although some intratumoral fungi originated from adjacent tissues, AM tumors exhibited a distinct fungal composition characterized by altered species richness, community structure, and an increased Ascomycota-to-Basidiomycota ratio. Several fungal taxa were identified as potential diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers and showed significant correlations with clinical parameters and immune infiltration. Specifically, the CD68-high samples harbored greater fungal diversity and higher relative abundance of compared with CD68-low samples. Furthermore, fungi-bacteria interactions were characterized by significant negative correlations between their diversity, while positive interspecies interactions dominated the network.
These findings underscore the potential role of the cancer mycobiome in AM and offer new insights into the tumor microenvironment and its implications for cancer prevention and therapy.
肿瘤内真菌最近被认为与癌症的发生和发展有关，具有作为预测癌症患者临床结局和治疗反应生物标志物的潜力。然而，它们在肢端黑色素瘤（AM）中的作用此前尚未被探索。
我们对AM肿瘤组织和相邻非肿瘤组织中的真菌群落进行了特征分析。通过生物信息学和生物统计学分析，评估了两种组织之间真菌群落的差异，以及肿瘤内真菌的预后和诊断潜力，及其与肿瘤微环境和临床病理特征的关联。
尽管一些肿瘤内真菌起源于相邻组织，但AM肿瘤表现出独特的真菌组成，其特征为物种丰富度、群落结构改变以及子囊菌门与担子菌门的比例增加。几种真菌分类群被确定为潜在的诊断和预后生物标志物，并与临床参数和免疫浸润显示出显著相关性。具体而言，与CD68低的样本相比，CD68高的样本具有更高的真菌多样性和更高的相对丰度。此外，真菌与细菌的相互作用表现为它们的多样性之间存在显著负相关，而种间正相互作用主导了网络。
这些发现强调了癌症真菌群落在AM中的潜在作用，并为肿瘤微环境及其对癌症预防和治疗的影响提供了新的见解。
