Issues

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is an aggressive disease with poor prognosis and limited methods to predict patient survival. Chemotaxis of regulatory T (Treg) immune cells into tumors and their activation are known to impact clinical outcome. As well, the prevalence (number or proportion) of FoxP3+Treg cells in tumors has been found to be negatively associated with patient prognosis. Here, the prognostic significance of immune infiltration within the tumor microenvironment was investigated using patient samples from two independent cohorts. Shown is a stylized version of an unsupervised hierarchical clustering of 23 cytokine (blue) and chemokine (red) gene expression levels using real-time PCR. The expression of CXCL16 and CCL20 correlated with the number of FoxP3+cells are likely to attract Treg cells into HCC tumors, suggesting that the proportion of Treg cells in tumor microenvironment is the most important immune predictor of tumor recurrence and survival in patients with HCC. See article by Lin and colleagues (beginning on page 594) for more information.