Characterizing diversity in the tumor-immune microenvironment of distinct subclasses of gastroesophageal adenocarcinomas

2020

Background Gastroesophageal adenocarcinomas (GEAs) are heterogeneous cancers where immune checkpoint inhibitors have robust efficacy in heavily inflamed microsatellite instability (MSI) or Epstein-Barr virus (EBV)-positive subtypes. Immune checkpoint inhibitor responses are markedly lower in diffuse/genome stable (GS) and chromosomal instable (CIN) GEAs. In contrast to EBV and MSI subtypes, the tumor microenvironment of CIN and GS GEAs have not been fully characterized to date, which limits our ability to improve immunotherapeutic strategies. Patients and methods Here we aimed to identify tumor-immune cell association across GEA subclasses using data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (N = 453 GE…