Plasmacytoid Dendritic Cell (pDC) Infiltration Correlate with Tumor Infiltrating Lymphocytes Cancer Immunity and Better Survival in Triple Negative Breast Cancer (TNBC) More Strongly than Conventional Dendritic Cell (cDC)

摘要

Dendritic cells (DC) represent a major antigen-presenting cell in the tumor immune microenvironment (TIME) and play an essential role in cancer immunity. Clinical relevance of plasmacytoid DC (pDC) and conventional DC (cDC) infiltration were studied in large patient cohorts using transcriptomic analyses. We found that high pDC was significantly associated with better survival in triple negative breast cancer (TNBC), but not cDC. High pDC TNBC tumors enriched immune and inflammation-related gene sets including IFN-γ signaling more strongly than cDC TNBC, which also enriched metastasis-related gene sets. pDC correlated with CD8+ and CD4+ memory T cells, and had a cytolytic activity score stronger than cDC in TNBC. High pDC TNBC were associated with a high fraction of anti-cancer immune cells and high expression of all the immune checkpoint molecules examined. For the first time, we found that pDC are correlated with immune response and survival in TNBC patients more strongly than cDC.