Abstract 13P
Background
The effect of tertiary lymphoid structures (TLSs) in patients with breast cancer (BC) remains controversial. The objective of current study is to investigate the clinicopathological and prognostic significance of TLSs in BC. Given unique difficulties for detecting and quantifying TLSs, a TLS-associated gene signature based on The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) BC cohort was used to validate and supplement our results. Our study was registered in the PROSPERO (registration number: CRD42022302921).
Methods
Ectronic platforms (PubMed, Web of Science, EMBASE, the Cochrane Library, NKI and Wangfang) were searched systematically to identify relevant researches as of January 11, 2022. We calculated combined odds ratios (ORs) with 95% confidence intervals (CIs) to determine the relationship between clinicopathological parameters and TLSs. The pooled hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% CIs were also calculated to evaluate the prognostic significance of TLSs. The TLS signature based on TCGA BC cohort was applied to validate and supplement our results.
Results
15 studies with 3898 patients were eligible for enrollment in our study. The combined analysis indicated that the presence of TLSs was related to improved disease-free survival (DFS) (HR= 0.61, 95% CI: 0.41–0.90, p< 0.05) and overall survival (OS) (HR= 1.66, 95% CI: 1.26-2.20, p < 0.001). Additionally, the presence of TLSs was positively correlated with early tumor TNM stage and high tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes. TLS presence was positively related to human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER-2) and Ki-67 but inversely correlated with the status of estrogen and progesterone receptor. Simultaneously, our study found that tumor immune microenvironment was more favorable in the high TLS signature group than in the low TLS signature group. Consistently, BC patients in the high TLS signature group exhibited better survival outcomes compared to those in the low TLS signature group, suggesting TLSs were favorable prognostic biomarkers.
Conclusions
TLS presence was strongly related to clinicopathological features and prognosis in patients with BC, which has the potential to act as an effective biomarker for the clinical assessments and predicting prognosis of BC.
Legal entity responsible for the study
The authors.
Funding
The National Natural Science Foundation of China.
Disclosure
All authors have declared no conflicts of interest.