Esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) is the most aggressive type of cancer among gastrointestinal cancers. The lack of effective anti-tumor immunity strategy for ESCC patients imposes urgent demand for new treatment paradigm. Tumor microenvironment (TME) is characterized by diverse cell populations (cancerous, immune cells, and pleiotropic nature of cytokines and inhibitory receptors) whose alternations are closely related with tumor progression. High mobility group box chromosomal protein 1 (HMGB1) has been recognized to be expressed in various tumor cells, and importantly it has also been identified as one of the key factors regulating inflammatory reactions.

By comparing differentially expressed genes between ESCC tumors (T) and their corresponding non-tumorous (NT) tissues high-throughput transcriptome sequencing system (RNA-Seq, Illumina HiSeq 2500), we found that the ligands of TIM-3 (an inhibitory receptor), HMGB1 and galectin-9, but not, cell-surface phosphatidylserine, were overexpressed in all ESCC samples when compared to their NT counterparts. We further characterized HMGB1 and galectin-9 gene expression changes in 37 matched primary ESCC T and NT control samples by qRT-PCR. We found that HMGB-1 and galectin-9 mRNA is constitutively expressed in all samples, while ESCC T tissue significantly expressed ~2fold higher of HMGB-1, but not galectin-9, mRNA as compared to paired NT tissue. Histopathological characterization of ESCC tissue by sequential single staining for B-cells (CD20) and plasma cells (CD138), demonstrating that B cell infiltrate was dominated by CD20+ B cells lacking of terminal differentiation into plasma cells. Additionally, CD20+ B cells infiltrates were negative for CD27 (marker for memory B cells) and IgD (marker for naïve B cells). Additionally, we isolated CD20+ B cells from healthy peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC), and stimulated with/without HMGB-1/IgM. Conditional medium (CM) were collected for foci formation and we found that ESCC cell lines KYSE30 and KYSE180 have better capacity for proliferation when culture with activated B cells CM as compared to unstimulated B cells. Collectively, we believe that the suboptimal clinical outcomes relies on CD20+HMGB1 receptor+ B cells that are exposed to high HMGB1 concentrations in the ESCC microenvironment may eventually become pro-tumor B cells subset.

Citation Format: Ngar Woon Kam, Xin-Yuan Guan, Dora Lai-Wan Kwong. Cross talk between tumor cell derived HMGB1 and adaptive B cells in the tumor microenvironment of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2017; 2017 Apr 1-5; Washington, DC. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2017;77(13 Suppl):Abstract nr 3999. doi:10.1158/1538-7445.AM2017-3999

©2017 American Association for Cancer Research.
2017
American Association for Cancer Research.