<em>Investigating the role of T cells in gastric tumour microenvironment</em> — ASN Events
  1. Schedule
  2. Poster Session Three
  3. Investigating the role of T cells in gastric tumour microenvironment

Investigating the role of T cells in gastric tumour microenvironment (#404)

Minyu Wang 1 2 3 4 , Yu-Kuan Huang 1 2 3 , Heloise Halse 4 , Rita A. Busuttil 1 2 3 , Paul J. Neeson 2 4 5 , Alex Boussioutas 1 2 3
  1. Upper Gastrointestinal Translational Research Laboratory, Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
  2. Sir Peter MacCallum Department of Oncology, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
  3. Department of Medicine, Victoria 3010, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
  4. Cancer Immunology Research, Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
  5. Department of Pathology, , Victoria 3010, Australia, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Background: Gastric cancer (GC) is the fifth most common cancer and the third leading cause of cancer death worldwide. Each molecular subtypes of gastric cancer exhibit different treatment response and subsequent clinical outcome. Documented successes of immunotherapy in a number of cancer types, provide a potential alternative therapy for limited-responding GC patients who have exhausted all conventional therapies. However, there are still deficiencies in understanding the biology of the immune microenvironment in different subtypes of GC.

Aims: By characterising the location and interaction of immune cell subsets in the gastric tumour microenvironment, patients can be stratified for individualised therapeutic management and provided with personalised cancer immunotherapies.

Methods: 58 clinically annotated gastric tumour sample was selected for further characterisation using multiplex immunohistochemistry (mIHC). mIHC is a new technology in which a single tissue section can be stained with up to 7 markers including CD4, CD8, CD3, FOXP3, CD56,AE1AE3 (as a tumour marker) and DAPI. The quantification of the T cell subsets, natural killer cells and tumour cells have been analysed for each patient.

Results: Higher numbers of cytotoxic T cell (P < 0.0001), helper T cells (P = 0.02) and CD4+FoxP3+ T cells(P = 0.02) are in the tumour edge compared to tumour core. There is a significant difference of cytotoxic T cells (P = 0.01) and CD4+FoxP3+ T cells (P = 0.03) distribution in the edge and core of CIN and GS subtypes of gastric tumours, while EBV and MSI subtypes did not. EBV and MSI subtypes have higher number of cytotoxic T cells both in the core (P = 0.03) and edge (P = 0.009) than CIN and GS subtypes.

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