With the continued promise of immunotherapy for treating cancer, understanding how host genetics contributes to the tumor immune microenvironment (TIME) is essential to tailoring cancer screening and treatment strategies. Here, we study 1084 eQTLs affecting the TIME found through analysis of The Cancer Genome Atlas and literature curation. These TIME eQTLs are enriched in areas of active transcription, and associate with gene expression in specific immune cell subsets, such as macrophages and dendritic cells. Polygenic score models built with TIME eQTLs reproducibly stratify cancer risk, survival and immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) response across independent cohorts. To assess whether an eQTL-informed approach could reveal potential cancer immunotherapy targets, we inhibit CTSS, a gene implicated by cancer risk and ICB response-associated polygenic models; CTSS inhibition results in slowed tumor growth and extended survival in vivo. These results validate the potential of integrating germline variation and TIME characteristics for uncovering potential targets for immunotherapy.

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The results of an experimental investigation of neutron emission characteristics in the Filippov-type plasma focus facility "Dena" (90 kJ, 25 kV, 288 µF) with D2 + %1 Kr as working gas are presented. From the experimental results, one can conclude that both thermonuclear and nonthermonuclear mechanisms are always present in neutron production, but their contributions to the total neutron yield are strongly dependent on the initial pressure and discharge voltage. It has been found that at constant discharge voltages and low pressures the beam-target interaction mechanism plays an important role in the neutron production and with increasing the pressure, its role decreases and the importance of thermonuclear mechanism increases. Also at constant pressures, the contribution of beam-target interaction mechanism in neutron production decreases with increasing the discharge energy. The value of the α index in the empirical neutron yield scaling law Yn ∝ I α ∝ E α/2 was found to be about 3.82.

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