Patterns of Immune Infiltration in Breast Cancer and Their Clinical Implications: A Gene-Expression-Based Retrospective Study

H. Raza Ali , Leon Chlon, Paul D. P. Pharoah, Florian Markowetz, Carlos Caldas

Abstract:

Background

Immune infiltration of breast tumours is associated with clinical outcome. However, past work has not accounted for the diversity of functionally distinct cell types that make up the immune response. The aim of this study was to determine whether differences in the cellular composition of the immune infiltrate in breast tumours influence survival and treatment response, and whether these effects differ by molecular subtype.

Methods and Findings

We applied an established computational approach (CIBERSORT) to bulk gene expression profiles of almost 11,000 tumours to infer the proportions of 22 subsets of immune cells. We investigated associations between each cell type and survival and response to chemotherapy, modelling cellular proportions as quartiles. We found that tumours with little or no immune infiltration were associated with different survival patterns according to oestrogen receptor (ER) status. In ER-negative disease, tumours lacking immune infiltration were associated with the poorest prognosis, whereas in ER-positive disease, they were associated with intermediate prognosis. Of the cell subsets investigated, T regulatory cells and M0 and M2 macrophages emerged as the most strongly associated with poor outcome, regardless of ER status. Among ER-negative tumours, CD8+ T cells (hazard ratio [HR] = 0.89, 95% CI 0.80–0.98; p = 0.02) and activated memory T cells (HR 0.88, 95% CI 0.80–0.97; p = 0.01) were associated with favourable outcome. T follicular helper cells (odds ratio [OR] = 1.34, 95% CI 1.14–1.57; p < 0.001) and memory B cells (OR = 1.18, 95% CI 1.0–1.39; p = 0.04) were associated with pathological complete response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy in ER-negative disease, suggesting a role for humoral immunity in mediating response to cytotoxic therapy. Unsupervised clustering analysis using immune cell proportions revealed eight subgroups of tumours, largely defined by the balance between M0, M1, and M2 macrophages, with distinct survival patterns by ER status and associations with patient age at diagnosis. The main limitations of this study are the use of diverse platforms for measuring gene expression, including some not previously used with CIBERSORT, and the combined analysis of different forms of follow-up across studies.

Conclusions

Large differences in the cellular composition of the immune infiltrate in breast tumours appear to exist, and these differences are likely to be important determinants of both prognosis and response to treatment. In particular, macrophages emerge as a possible target for novel therapies. Detailed analysis of the cellular immune response in tumours has the potential to enhance clinical prediction and to identify candidates for immunotherapy.

Citation: Ali HR, Chlon L, Pharoah PDP, Markowetz F, Caldas C (2016) Patterns of Immune Infiltration in Breast Cancer and Their Clinical Implications: A Gene-Expression-Based Retrospective Study. PLoS Med 13(12): e1002194. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1002194

Academic Editor: Marc Ladanyi, MSKCC, UNITED STATES

Received: July 25, 2016; Accepted: November 4, 2016; Published: December 13, 2016

Copyright: © 2016 Ali et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: The complete dataset used for all analyses is available at https://github.com/cclab-brca.

Funding: HRA is an NIHR Academic Clinical Lecturer and was a recipient of a Career Development Fellowship from The Pathological Society of GB and N Ireland, and a Starter Grant for Clinical Lecturers from the Academy of Medical Sciences. LC, CC, and FM received funding from the CRUK & EPSRC Cancer Imaging Centre in Cambridge & Manchester (grant C197/A16465). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Abbreviations: ER, oestrogen receptor; HR, hazard ratio; OR, odds ratio; pCR, pathological complete response; Tfh cell, T follicular helper cell; TGCA, The Cancer Genome Atlas