Quantitative and reproducible method to evaluate outcomes in cancer
2016
Yale University, New Haven, USA
With the advent of effective immunotherapies for cancer, there has been renewed interest in the tumor immune infiltrate. A number of studies have shown the prognostic value of the presence of tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) in a range of cancer types. Alas, the issue of assessment of TILs is problematic and has been addressed by an international consortium of pathologists. In the present study, the researchers have used a previously validated immunocytochemistry and image analysis approach to measure TILs in collected biopsies from three different regions of resected breast tumors. The study describes the distribution of different TIL phenotypic markers, both within separate regions of a tumor and within a given tissue section, and then apply statistical analysis to determine the degree of variance for each marker across the tumor. The study show application of an objective and reproducible assay to quantify the distribution of TIL expression in breast tumors. Future studies with larger patient populations with outcome data are needed to validate this observation.
Quantitative assessment of the spatial heterogeneity of tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes in breast cancer
David L. Rimm
Added on: 09-15-2021
[1] https://breast-cancer-research.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13058-016-0737-x[2] https://data.jrc.ec.europa.eu/dataset/352f7dfd-05cf-434b-a96a-7e270dc76573
