Innate Immune Cells in the Esophageal Tumor Microenvironment

Abstract

Esophageal cancer (EC) is one of the most common mucosa-associated tumors, and is characterized by aggressiveness, poor prognosis, and unfavorable patient survival rates. As an organ directly exposed to the risk of foodborne infection, the esophageal mucosa harbors distinct populations of innate immune cells, which play vital roles in both maintenance of esophageal homeostasis and immune defense and surveillance during mucosal anti-infection and anti-tumor responses. In this review, we highlight recent progress in research into innate immune cells in the microenvironment of EC, including lymphatic lineages, such as natural killer and γδT cells, and myeloid lineages, including macrophages, dendritic cells, neutrophils, myeloid-derived suppressor cells, mast cells and eosinophils. Further, putative innate immune cellular and molecular mechanisms involved in tumor occurrence and progression are discussed, to highlight potential directions for the development of new biomarkers and effective intervention targets, which can hopefully be applied in long-term multilevel clinical EC treatment. Fully understanding the innate immunological mechanisms involved in esophageal mucosa carcinogenesis is of great significance for clinical immunotherapy and prognosis prediction for patients with EC.

Ferroptosis-Related lncRNA Signature Correlates with the Prognosis, Tumor Microenvironment, and Therapeutic Sensitivity of Esophageal Squamous Cell Carcinoma

“…Several studies have shown that increased numbers of mast cells, macrophages, and neutrophils are associated with poor prognosis in certain solid tumors, which is consistent with the observations in the current study [ 53 ]. The present study observed that the proportion of CD8+ T cells was high in ESCC patients with a low risk.…”

Esophageal squamous cell carcinoma: Integrated bioinformatics analysis for differential gene expression with identification of hub genes and lncRNA

“…CXCL8 was the highest corresponding gene which might have a crucial effect on ESCC metastasis. Previous authors detected this gene as the primary cause for ESCC occurrence [ 5 , 42 ]. MMP3, MMP1, and MMP13 gene expression related to cancer occurrence is explained by previous studies [ 8 , 38 ].…”

The Emerging Role of Tissue-Resident Memory CD8+ T Lymphocytes in Human Digestive Tract Cancers

“…There is no denying that the use of PD-1 inhibitors to reverse the exhaustion of immune cells such as CD8 + Trm cells, alone or with other checkpoint antibodies, has had controversial results. Due to tumor heterogeneity, a lack of reproducibility of results, and a complex scoring system, PD-L1 is not suitable as a predictive biomarker (97). While methods such as the combined positive score, which detects PD-L1 levels in tumors and lymphocytes, can be used clinically to evaluate patient response to PD-1/PD-L1-related inhibitors, their specificity for evaluating therapeutic impact is poor (98).…”