Researchers at Saint Louis University School of Medicine investigated differences in T-cell responses between male and female patients with lung cancer that may help direct future treatments.
Elise Alspach, Ph.D. and her team aimed to understand what determines good T-cell responses in patients, why some patients seem to have better T-cell responses than others, and why some patients respond well to immunotherapies. Research findings recently published in Cancer Immunology Research show that a protein called CXCL13 that has recently been linked to immunotherapy response in patients is more highly expressed in females than males. Additionally, Alspach and her team found that CXCL13 expression is a better marker of immunotherapy response in females than in males.
Alspach and her team used single-cell RNA sequencing in human datasets to understand more about differences in how male and female immune systems respond to tumors. Single-cell RNA sequencing allows scientists to learn what’s happening inside individual cells. Using this technology, Alspach and her team determined that T-cells that infiltrate female tumors are highly activated and ready to identify tumor cells and kill them. They also noted immune suppressive T-cells present more frequently in male tumors than in female tumors.
Alspach and her team discovered that there is growing evidence that the male sex is associated with a better response to immunotherapy, which she said appears to contrast with their work and recently published papers showing that females mount stronger immune responses against their tumors.
Because immune responses against tumors are different between the sexes, Alspach and her colleagues concluded that it makes sense to potentially design different treatments for male versus female patients. In the future, she hopes more appropriate therapeutic strategies will be devised to target the pathways that mediate better tumor control in ways that benefit individual patients.
