Immune cell mix predicts chemotherapy response to agressive breast cancer

Good news! Cancer is history (soon)!

The ideologues at the former prestigious Nature journal again resorted to calling women "people". Very appalling!

"Immune cells called macrophages might determine whether people with an aggressive form of breast cancer respond to chemotherapy or not. After examining tissue samples from more than 100 people [???] with triple-negative breast cancer, researchers identified eight distinct cellular communities, or ecotypes, in tumours. “Some macrophage subtypes are associated with good response to chemotherapy, while others are associated with poor response — they play a dual role,” .... “This is important in triple-negative breast cancer where most of the focus on immune cells has previously been on the T-cell populations.”"

• "Triple-negative breast cancer is treated with chemotherapy, but outcomes vary significantly among patients
• Tumors have unique characteristics at the genetic and cellular level that impact the immune system and the way it responds to treatment
• Researchers found that certain subtypes of immune cells, called macrophages, are associated with response to chemotherapy before treatment
• A panel of 13 genes can help predict which patients have tumors that are more likely to respond to chemotherapy

..."

From the abstract:

"Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is an aggressive subtype that is frequently treated with chemotherapy, but only half of the patients respond well and have good clinical outcome.

Here we leveraged pretreatment tissue samples from treatment-naive patients with TNBC who received neoadjuvant chemotherapy and performed single-cell transcriptomic analysis of 427,857 cells from 101 patients and spatial transcriptomic analysis of 44 patients.

We classified TNBC tumours into 4 patient-level subtypes (archetypes) using the cancer-cell gene expression and identified 13 metaprograms that reflect intra-tumoural heterogeneity at the single-cell level.

The TNBC tumour microenvironment consisted of 49 immune and stromal cell states, many of which were reprogrammed relative to normal breast tissues. Furthermore, we identified eight distinct cellular communities (ecotypes) on the basis of the co-occurrences of cancer cells and tumour microenvironment cell types, and their spatial organization in tissues.

In contrast to previous studies on T cells, our data show the importance of macrophage subtypes and cancer-cell metaprograms for interferon signalling, human leukocyte antigen expression and cell cycle activity that are associated with a good response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy.

Collectively, this study provides new insights into the biology of untreated TNBC tumours and their association with chemotherapy response."

Nature Briefing: Cancer

Study may help predict response to chemotherapy in triple-negative breast cancer (original news release)

Ecotypes of triple-negative breast cancer in response to chemotherapy (open access)

Fig. 1: Study design and main cell types in TNBC.

Fig. 2: Patient-level archetypes of patients with TNBC identified from cancer cells.

Extended Data Fig. 10: Classifiers for predicting NAC response and graphical summary.