scholarly journals The Impact of Immune Microenvironment on the Prognosis of Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma Based on Multi-Omics Analysis

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bing Yang ◽  
Mingyao Zhou ◽  
Yunzi Wu ◽  
Yuanyuan Ma ◽  
Qin Tan ◽  
...  

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is a malignant tumor characterized by rapid progression, early metastasis, high recurrence, and limited responsiveness to conventional therapies. The 5-year survival rate of PDAC is extremely low (<8%), which lacks effective prognostic evaluation indicators. In this study, we used xCell to analyze infiltrating immune cells in a tumor and through the univariate and multivariate Cox analyses screened out two prognosis-related immune cells, CD4+TN and common lymphoid progenitor (CLP), which were used to construct a Cox model and figure out the risk-score. It was found that the constructed model could greatly improve the sensitivity of prognostic evaluation, that the higher the risk-score, the worse the prognosis. In addition, the risk-score could also identify molecular subtypes with poor prognosis and immunotherapy sensitivity. Through transcriptome and whole-exome sequencing analysis of PDAC dataset from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), it was found that copy number deletion and low expression of CCL19 might be crucial factors to affect the risk-score. Lastly, validation of the above findings was confirmed not only in Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) datasets but also in our PDAC patient samples, Peking2020 cohort.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qianhui Xu ◽  
Yuxin Wang ◽  
Wen Huang

Abstract Background: An increasing body of evidence has suggested that long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) can serve as essential regulators in cancer immunity. We aimed to establish a robust immune-associated lncRNA signature for pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) outcome prediction to enhance prognostic accuracy.Methods: Pancreatic cancer samples were obtained from the The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) project. Immune‐related lncRNAs displaying significant association with overall survival (OS) were screened through univariate Cox regression analysis and the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) algorithm. The prediction reliability was further estimated in the internal validation set and combination set. Gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) of the lncRNA model risk score was performed for functional annotation. The correlation between immune checkpoint inhibitors and this signature was examined. Results: 5 immune-related lncRNAs were confirmed to establish five‐immune-related lncRNAs prognostic signature. The constructed risk model showed significant correlation with PDAC OS. The area under the curve (AUC) for this lncRNA model was up to 0.747. This immune‐related lncRNA signature was correlated with disease progression and worse survival and was an independent prognostic biomarker. Our signature mediated chondrocyte development, laminin binding and so forth. This risk score model was associated with immune cell infiltration (i.e., CD4 T cells, etc.,) and immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) immunotherapy‐related molecules (i.e., PDCD1 and CTLA4).Conclusion: The immune‐related lncRNA signature we established possesses latent prognostic value for patients with PDAC and may have the potential to measure the response to ICB immunotherapy, which could guide for immunological treatment in PDAC.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. e190074
Author(s):  
Ahmed M. Amer ◽  
Yufeng Li ◽  
David Summerlin ◽  
Constantine M. Burgan ◽  
Michelle M. McNamara ◽  
...  

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ritu Pandey ◽  
Muhan Zhou ◽  
Shariful Islam ◽  
Baowei Chen ◽  
Natalie K Barker ◽  
...  

AbstractWe investigated biomarker CEACAM6, a highly abundant cell surface adhesion receptor that modulates the extracellular matrix (ECM) in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDA). The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) RNA-Seq data from PDA patients were analyzed for CEACAM6 expression and evaluated for overall survival, association, enrichment and correlations. A CRISPR/Cas9 Knockout (KO) of CEACAM6 in PDA cell line for quantitative proteomics, mitochondrial bioenergetics and tumor growth in mice were conducted. We found CEACAM6 is over-expressed in primary and metastatic basal and classical PDA subtypes. Highest levels are in classical activated stroma subtype. CEACAM6 over-expression is universally a poor prognostic marker in KRAS mutant and wild type PDA. High CEACAM6 expression is associated with low cytolytic T-cell activity in both basal and classical PDA subtypes and correlates with low levels of T-REG markers. In HPAF-II cells knockout of CEACAM6 alters ECM-cell adhesion, catabolism, immune environment, transmembrane transport and autophagy. CEACAM6 loss increases mitochondrial basal and maximal respiratory capacity. HPAF-II CEACAM6−/− cells are growth suppressed by >65% vs. wild type in mice bearing tumors. CEACAM6, a key regulator affects several hallmarks of PDA including the fibrotic reaction, immune regulation, energy metabolism and is a novel therapeutic target in PDA.


Stresses ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-47
Author(s):  
Maria Mortoglou ◽  
David Wallace ◽  
Aleksandra Buha Buha Djordjevic ◽  
Vladimir Djordjevic ◽  
E. Damla Arisan ◽  
...  

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is the most aggressive and invasive type of pancreatic cancer (PCa) and is expected to be the second most common cause of cancer-associated deaths. The high mortality rate is due to the asymptomatic progression of the clinical features until the advanced stages of the disease and the limited effectiveness of the current therapeutics. Aberrant expression of several microRNAs (miRs/miRNAs) has been related to PDAC progression and thus they could be potential early diagnostic, prognostic, and/or therapeutic predictors for PDAC. miRs are small (18 to 24 nucleotides long) non-coding RNAs, which regulate the expression of key genes by targeting their 3′-untranslated mRNA region. Increased evidence has also suggested that the chemoresistance of PDAC cells is associated with metabolic alterations. Metabolic stress and the dysfunctionality of systems to compensate for the altered metabolic status of PDAC cells is the foundation for cellular damage. Current data have implicated multiple systems as hallmarks of PDAC development, such as glutamine redox imbalance, oxidative stress, and mitochondrial dysfunction. Hence, both the aberrant expression of miRs and dysregulation in metabolism can have unfavorable effects in several biological processes, such as apoptosis, cell proliferation, growth, survival, stress response, angiogenesis, chemoresistance, invasion, and migration. Therefore, due to these dismal statistics, it is crucial to develop beneficial therapeutic strategies based on an improved understanding of the biology of both miRs and metabolic mediators. This review focuses on miR-mediated pathways and therapeutic resistance mechanisms in PDAC and evaluates the impact of metabolic alterations in the progression of PDAC.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dongjie Chen ◽  
Hui Huang ◽  
Longjun Zang ◽  
Wenzhe Gao ◽  
Hongwei Zhu ◽  
...  

We aim to construct a hypoxia- and immune-associated risk score model to predict the prognosis of patients with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC). By unsupervised consensus clustering algorithms, we generate two different hypoxia clusters. Then, we screened out 682 hypoxia-associated and 528 immune-associated PDAC differentially expressed genes (DEGs) of PDAC using Pearson correlation analysis based on the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and Genotype-Tissue Expression project (GTEx) dataset. Seven hypoxia and immune-associated signature genes (S100A16, PPP3CA, SEMA3C, PLAU, IL18, GDF11, and NR0B1) were identified to construct a risk score model using the Univariate Cox regression and the Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO) Cox regression, which stratified patients into high- and low-risk groups and were further validated in the GEO and ICGC cohort. Patients in the low-risk group showed superior overall survival (OS) to their high-risk counterparts (p < 0.05). Moreover, it was suggested by multivariate Cox regression that our constructed hypoxia-associated and immune-associated prognosis signature might be used as the independent factor for prognosis prediction (p < 0.001). By CIBERSORT and ESTIMATE algorithms, we discovered that patients in high-risk groups had lower immune score, stromal score, and immune checkpoint expression such as PD-L1, and different immunocyte infiltration states compared with those low-risk patients. The mutation spectrum also differs between high- and low-risk groups. To sum up, our hypoxia- and immune-associated prognostic signature can be used as an approach to stratify the risk of PDAC.


Author(s):  
Xuefei Liu ◽  
Ziwei Luo ◽  
Xuechen Ren ◽  
Zhihang Chen ◽  
Xiaoqiong Bao ◽  
...  

Background: Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is dominated by an immunosuppressive microenvironment, which makes immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) often non-responsive. Understanding the mechanisms by which PDAC forms an immunosuppressive microenvironment is important for the development of new effective immunotherapy strategies.Methods: This study comprehensively evaluated the cell-cell communications between malignant cells and immune cells by integrative analyses of single-cell RNA sequencing data and bulk RNA sequencing data of PDAC. A Malignant-Immune cell crosstalk (MIT) score was constructed to predict survival and therapy response in PDAC patients. Immunological characteristics, enriched pathways, and mutations were evaluated in high- and low MIT groups.Results: We found that PDAC had high level of immune cell infiltrations, mainly were tumor-promoting immune cells. Frequent communication between malignant cells and tumor-promoting immune cells were observed. 15 ligand-receptor pairs between malignant cells and tumor-promoting immune cells were identified. We selected genes highly expressed on malignant cells to construct a Malignant-Immune Crosstalk (MIT) score. MIT score was positively correlated with tumor-promoting immune infiltrations. PDAC patients with high MIT score usually had a worse response to immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) immunotherapy.Conclusion: The ligand-receptor pairs identified in this study may provide potential targets for the development of new immunotherapy strategy. MIT score was established to measure tumor-promoting immunocyte infiltration. It can serve as a prognostic indicator for long-term survival of PDAC, and a predictor to ICB immunotherapy response.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Mahnaz ◽  
L. Das Roy ◽  
M. Bose ◽  
C. De ◽  
S. Nath ◽  
...  

ABSTRACTMyeloid-derived suppressor cells (MDSCs) are immature myeloid cells that are responsible for immunosuppression in tumor microenvironment. Here we report the impact of mucin 1 (MUC1), a transmembrane glycoprotein, on proliferation and functional activity of MDSCs. To determine the role of MUC1 in MDSC phenotype, we analyzed MDSCs derived from wild type (WT) and MUC1-knockout (MUC1KO) mice bearing pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma KCKO and breast cancer C57MG xenografts. We observed enhanced tumor growth in MUC1KO mice compared to WT mice in both pancreatic KCKO and breast C57MG cancer models due to increased MDSC population and enrichment of Tregs in tumor microenvironment. Our current study shows that knockdown of MUC1 in MDSCs promotes proliferation and immature suppressive phenotype indicated by increased level of iNOS, ARG1 activity and TGF-β secretion under cancer conditions. Increased activity of MDSCs leads to repression of IL-2 and IFN-ɣ production by T-cells. We were able to find that MDSCs from MUC1KO mice have higher levels of c-Myc and activated pSTAT3 as compared to MUC1 WT mice, that are signaling pathways leading to increased survival, proliferation and prevention of maturation. In summary, MUC1 regulates signaling pathways that maintain immunosuppressive properties of MDSCs. Thus, immunotherapy must target only tumor associated MUC1 on epithelial cells and not MUC1 on hematopoietic cells to avoid expansion and suppressive functions of MDSC.


2021 ◽  
Vol 108 (Supplement_9) ◽  
Author(s):  
James Russell ◽  
Claire Stevens ◽  
Rahul Bhome ◽  
Dimitrios Karavias ◽  
Ali Arshad ◽  
...  

Abstract Background Portal vein resection (PVR) with pancreaticoduodenectomy (PD) is often performed to achieve clear margins for patients with vascular involvement in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC). However, there is evidence to suggest that patients undergoing PVR often have more advanced cancers, therefore the impact of PVR on survival and recurrence remains unclear. The aim of this study is to assess overall (OS) and recurrence free (RFS) survival in patients who underwent PVR during PD, with particular attention to margin positivity. Methods A retrospective analysis was performed on 638 patients who underwent PD during a 12-year period. Exclusion criteria included PD for non-PDAC tumours, neoadjuvant chemotherapy or intra-operative radiotherapy. 374 patients were included in the study (90 PVR and 284 non-PVR). Patient characteristics and histopathological factors associated with OS and RFS were then evaluated using univariate and multivariate Cox regression analyses. 270 patients (90 PVR and 180 non-PVR), were matched by propensity score based on perineural invasion, pT and pN staging. The Kaplan-Meier method was used to calculate survival and log-rank tests. Results Resection margin positivity was associated with shorter OS and RFS (p < 0.0001), and the superior mesenteric vein (SMV) margin was the most significant risk factor for survival on competing risks analysis. Absent adjuvant chemotherapy, nodal metastasis and margin positivity were independent risk factors for OS and RFS on multivariate analysis. PVR was associated with higher intra-operative blood loss (p = 0.009), but was not associated with increased length of stay, complications or readmissions. PVR patients had increased pT staging, nodal metastasis and perineural invasion, however, there was no difference in OS (p = 0.551) or RFS (p = 0.256) between PVR and non-PVR after propensity matching. Conclusions Positive resection margins are associated with shorter survival times, and the SMV margin is the most significant prognostic indicator for overall survival and recurrence compared to other margins. PVR is a relatively safe procedure, however, it does not achieve the intended survival benefits of complete margin clearance. The impact on survival for margin positivity, particularly the SMV margin, and nodal metastasis should be considered when making decisions with regards to vein resection and adjuvant treatments.


Gut ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 148-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudio Luchini ◽  
Lodewijk A A Brosens ◽  
Laura D Wood ◽  
Deyali Chatterjee ◽  
Jae Il Shin ◽  
...  

ObjectiveRecently, tumours with microsatellite instability (MSI)/defective DNA mismatch repair (dMMR) have gained considerable interest due to the success of immunotherapy in this molecular setting. Here, we aim to clarify clinical-pathological and/or molecular features of this tumour subgroup through a systematic review coupled with a comparative analysis with existing databases, also providing indications for a correct approach to the clinical identification of MSI/dMMR pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC).DesignPubMed, SCOPUS and Embase were searched for studies reporting data on MSI/dMMR in PDAC up to 30 November 2019. Histological and molecular data of MSI/dMMR PDAC were compared with non-MSI/dMMR PDAC and with PDAC reference cohorts (including SEER database and The Cancer Genome Atlas Research Network - TCGA project).ResultsOverall, 34 studies with 8323 patients with PDAC were included in the systematic review. MSI/dMMR demonstrated a very low prevalence in PDAC (around 1%–2%). Compared with conventional PDAC, MSI/dMMR PDAC resulted strongly associated with medullary and mucinous/colloid histology (p<0.01) and with a KRAS/TP53 wild-type molecular background (p<0.01), with more common JAK genes mutations. Data on survival are still unclear.ConclusionPDAC showing typical medullary or mucinous/colloid histology should be routinely examined for MSI/dMMR status using specific tests (immunohistochemistry, followed by MSI-PCR in cases with doubtful results). Next-generation sequencing (NGS) should be adopted either where there is limited tissue or as part of NGS tumour profiling in the context of precision oncology, acknowledging that conventional histology of PDAC may rarely harbour MSI/dMMR.


Biomedicines ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (12) ◽  
pp. 565
Author(s):  
Sona Ciernikova ◽  
Maria Novisedlakova ◽  
Danka Cholujova ◽  
Viola Stevurkova ◽  
Michal Mego

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is one of the most aggressive malignant tumors due to the absence of biomarkers for early-stage detection and poor response to therapy. Since mounting evidence supports the role of microbiota composition in tumorigenesis and cancer treatment, the link between microbiome and PDAC has been described. In this review, we summarize the current knowledge regarding the impact of the gut and oral microbiome on the risk of PDAC development. Microenvironment-driven therapy and immune system interactions are also discussed. More importantly, we provide an overview of the clinical trials evaluating the microbiota role in the risk, prognosis, and treatment of patients suffering from PDAC and solid tumors. According to the research findings, immune tolerance might result from the microbiota-derived remodeling of pancreatic tumor microenvironment. Thus, microbiome profiling and targeting represent the potential trend to enhance antitumor immunity and improve the efficacy of PDAC treatment.


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