The correlation between immune status of patients and their prognosis in non-small cell lung cancer.

Abstract

e23192 Background: In order to investigate the association of immune status with the prognosis in patients with lung cancer and to screen the potential prognostic markers, the immune status including the expression levels of tumor surface molecules, tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TIL) and cytokines, sMICA and sMICB in serum were detected in this study. Methods: Tissue and serum samples of 125 patients with NSCLC were obtained from the First Hospital of Jilin Universtiy. 50 serum samples of healthy volunteers were obtained as controls. Surface molecules of cancer cell, such as MHC-I, PD-L1, MICA/B and CD8+ TIL were detected with immunohistochemistry. Cytokines such as IL-2, IL-4, IL-6, IL-10, IFN-γ, TNF-α levels in serum were detected with Luminex. sMICA and sMICB levels were examined by ELISA. The association between their expression levels and patients’ prognosis was analyzed by SPSS 17.0 software. Results: MHC-I was down-expressed, PD-L1 and MICA/B were up-regulated in NSCLC. CD8+ TIL could be seen in tumor stroma and nest. In univariate analysis, we found that patients with down-expression of MHC-I and up-regulation of PD-L1 had a poor prognosis (P < 0.05). MICA/B expression had no correlation with patients’ prognosis (P > 0.05). Patients with more stromal CD8+ TIL might have better prognosis. In multivariate analysis, we found that MHC-I and stromal CD8+ TIL might be independent prognostic factors in NSCLC (P < 0.05). TNF-α and IFN-γ were significantly decreased, IL-6 was increased in NSCLC patients (P < 0.05). There were no connections between the cytokines levels with patients’ prognosis (P > 0.05). Serum sMICA was significantly higher in NSCLC patients than healthy controls (P < 0.05). sMICB tented to be elevated in NSCLC compared with health controls, but there was no significant difference (P > 0.05). High sMICA expression had an association with poor prognosis (P < 0.05). There was no connection between the sMICB level with patients’ prognosis (P > 0.05). Conclusions: The immune status of patients with NSCLC had a close association with their prognosis in this study. It worths further study to confirm the clinical value of MHC-I expression, stromal CD8+ TIL and serum sMICA as prognostic marker in the patients with NSCLC.