Emerging evidence of anti-tumor immune control in the central nervous system

Abstract

Microarray-based studies by our laboratory confirm that the immune control of tumor progression extends to the "immunoprivileged" central nervous system, identifying prognostic immune gene signatures in primary tumor specimens. Our results provide rationale and mechanistic insights for the development of immunotherapeutic strategies against brain tumors.

Figure 1. Kaplan-Meier survival analysis demonstrating total immune cell infiltration in high-grade astrocytoma as an independent prognostic variable when combined with clinical performance score. High immune cell infiltration was defined as greater than median cytotoxic T cell, helper T cell or > 75th percentile microglia. Karnofsky/Lansky clinical performance score, was used to measure patient well-being. In this case, good performance was defined as greater than median. Cox proportional hazard multivariate analysis demonstrated that both high immune and good performance significantly contributed to longer survival (p values = 0.0077 and 0.0027, respectively).