Immunologists at Saint Louis University School of Medicine sought to compare male and female lung cancer patients’ T-cell activity that may guide future therapeutic interventions.
T-cell responses are immunologic reactions that constitute a component of the adaptive immune system that includes the body’s sophisticated system for keeping watch for danger signals and creating a specific immune response.
Immunotherapies which mean therapies where the patient’s immunity is harnessed to treat them have many possibilities in doing away with the way patients are managed.
But one of the biggest issues with immunotherapies today is that they are very effective only in a small number of patients,” Elise Alspach, Ph.D., assistant professor of molecular microbiology and immunology at SLU, who is the senior author of the paper.
New published research in the journal Cancer Immunology Research suggests that the protein known to be associated with immunotherapy recently is significantly upregulated in females compared to males. However, more recent work by Alspach and her group also identified that CXCL13 is a more favourable immunotherapy biomarker for female patients than for male patients.
Single cell RNA sequencing in human datasets by Alspach and her team are necessary to learn more about the differences in the immune response of the male and female body to tumour growth.
Progenitor and niche cells offer great promise for the generation of new therapies since scRNA sequencing makes it possible for academics to discover what is going on in individual cells.
By applying this technology, Alspach and her team concluded that T-cells that intravesically infiltrate female tumours are highly activated and prepared to recognize the tumour cells and destroy them. They also defined higher immune suppressive T-cells in male tumours than in the female tumours.
Malachi Alspach and her team likewise found that there is already emerging evidence that the male sex is prognostication of better immunotherapy, which she said seems to stand in comparison to their work and other studies published recently demonstrating that females elicit more potent immune responses against their cancers.
‘Right now, we don’t know why males might respond better than females to immune targeting therapies, but it too highlights that there is much work left to do to understand the sex variable in the immune response to cancer’.
Immunotherapies are usually more well tolerated in most patients and patients can be much better able to keep a good quality of life because the immune system can be trained to recognize the tumour as foreign and attack it without attacking all tissues in the body.
Since immune responses against tumours are sex-related, the limited studies led Alspach and her team to determine it might be warranted to develop different treatment strategies based on the patient’s gender. For the future, she wants improved therapeutic approaches to be developed to influence the pathways that contribute to improved tumour control in a patient specific fashion.
Reference:
Bridjes O’Neil. Identifying sex-based differences in immune responses against tumours
Cancer Immunology Research (2024). DOI: 10.1158/2326-6066.CIR-23-0826
