Dendritic cell-cytokine-induced killer (DC-CIK) cell therapy has been experimentally implemented for enhancing anti-tumoral immunity in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) undergoing postoperative transcatheter arterial chemoembolization (POTACE). We performed a retrospective study to evaluate the clinical efficacies of DC-CIK cell therapy and its correlations with several immune factors of the primary tumors. The overall survival time of HCC patients with HBV infection in the study group (POTACE plus DC-CIK cell therapy) was significantly longer than that of the control group (POTACE alone). The expression level of PD-L1 but not the tumor-infiltrated CD8 and CD4 T cells in the tumor tissues showed significant negative correlations with relapse-free survival (RFS) and overall survival (OS), which was also an independent prognostic factor for the five-years' suvival of patients with HCC receiving POTACE treatment. Furthermore, our study validated that PD-L1 expression was significantly inversely correlated with the survival time of HCC patients receiving POTACE plus DC-CIK cell therapy treatment. More importantly, DC-CIK cell therapy provided the best clinical benefits to HCC patients with the low PD-L1 expression receiving POTACE, which indicate that PD-L1 expression level can serve as a pivotal predictor for the therapeutic efficacy of DC-CIK cell therapy for HCC patients receiving POTACE treatment.
Purpose To study in detail the expression pattern and prognostic significance of TMPRSS4 in colorectal cancer. Methods The expression of TMPRSS4 protein was determined using Western blot in the colorectal cancer tissues and normal tissues. Immunohistochemistry was used to detect the TMPRSS4 expression in colorectal cancer tissues, and the clinicopathologic characteristics and prognostic significance were analyzed. Results TMPRSS4 overexpression was associated with tumor budding, lymphovascular invasion, perineural invasion, cancerous emboli, infiltration depth, lymph node metastasis, distant metastasis, and tumor node metastasis stage ( P < 0.05 for all). Interestingly, TMPRSS4 expression in the tumor budding, tumor emboli, lymph node, and liver metastatic tumor samples was higher than in the paired primary tumors. In contrast, TMPRSS4 overexpression is inversely correlated with both the overall survival and the disease-free survival of the patients with colorectal cancer ( P < 0.05 for both). Also, we found that TMPRSS4 is only of significance in predicting the prognosis of stage III and IV colorectal cancer, not stage I and II. Conclusions TMPRSS4 was shown to be involved in the whole process of metastasis from tumor budding to lymph node and/or distant metastasis in colorectal cancer and predicted the unfavorable prognosis of stage III–IV, indicating that it is a novel target for the precise treatment of colorectal cancer with lymph node or distant organ metastasis.
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