TY  - JOUR
A1  - Balermpas, Panagiotis
A1  - Michel, Yvonne
A1  - Wagenblast, Jens
A1  - Seitz, Oliver
A1  - Weiß, Christian
A1  - Rödel, Franz
A1  - Rödel, Claus
A1  - Fokas, Emmanouil
T1  - Tumour-infiltrating lymphocytes predict response to definitive chemoradiotherapy in head and neck cancer
T2  - British Journal of Cancer
N2  - Bbackground: We aimed to investigate the prognostic value of tumour-infiltrating lymphocytes’ (TILs) expression in pretreatment specimens from patients with head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) treated with definitive chemoradiotherapy (CRT).
Methods: The prevalence of CD3+, CD8+, CD4+ and FOXP3+ TILs was assessed using immunohistochemistry in tumour tissue obtained from 101 patients before CRT and was correlated with clinicopathological characteristics as well as local failure-free- (LFFS), distant metastases free- (DMFS), progression-free (PFS) and overall survival (OS). Survival curves were measured using the Kaplan–Meier method, and differences in survival between the groups were estimated using the log-rank test. Prognostic effects of TIL subset density were determined using the Cox regression analysis.
Results: With a mean follow-up of 25 months (range, 2.3–63 months), OS at 2 years was 57.4% for the entire cohort. Patients with high immunohistochemical CD3 and CD8 expression had significantly increased OS (P=0.024 and P=0.028), PFS (P=0.044 and P=0.047) and DMFS (P=0.021 and P=0.026) but not LFFS (P=0.90 and P=0.104) in multivariate analysis that included predictive clinicopathologic factors, such as age, sex, T-stage, N-stage, tumour grading and localisation. Neither CD4 nor FOXP3 expression showed significance for the clinical outcome. The lower N-stage was associated with improved OS in the multivariate analysis (P=0.049).
Conclusion: The positive correlation between a high number of infiltrating CD3+ and CD8+ cells and clinical outcome indicates that TILs may have a beneficial role in HNSCC patients and may serve as a biomarker to identify patients likely to benefit from definitive CRT.
KW  - tumour-infiltrating lymphocytes
KW  - radiotherapy
KW  - head and neck cancer
KW  - prognostic value
Y1  - 2013
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/34309
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-343094
SN  - 0007-0920
N1  - This work is published under the standard license to publish agreement. After 12 months the work will become freely available and the license terms will switch to a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
N1  - There is a Corrigendum (21 January 2014) associated with this article.  http://www.nature.com/bjc/journal/v110/n2/full/bjc2013825a.html
VL  - 110
SP  - 501
EP  - 509
PB  - Nature Publ. Group
CY  - Edinburgh
ER  -