Discover the pivotal role of CD163+ tumor-associated macrophages in forecasting the survival odds for HER2+ breast cancer patients, a potential game-changer in oncology prognostics.
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High Numbers of CD163+ Tumor-Associated Macrophages Predict Poor Prognosis in HER2+ Breast Cancer.
Jääskeläinen et al., Cancers (Basel) 2024
<!– DOI: 10.3390/cancers16030634 //–>
https://doi.org/10.3390/cancers16030634
The study explores the prognostic significance of tumor-associated macrophages (TAMs) in breast cancer (BC), focusing on M2-like TAMs (CD163+) and all TAMs (CD68+). Analyzing a cohort of 278 non-metastatic BC patients, with half being HER2+ (n = 139), the research found that high counts of both CD163+ and CD68+ TAMs correlated with poorer outcomes in the entire cohort (p ≤ 0.023). Specifically, in HER2+ BC patients, a high CD163+ TAM count was a strong independent predictor of poor prognosis for overall survival (OS), breast cancer-specific survival (BCSS), and disease-free survival (DFS) (p < 0.001).
This negative prognostic impact was consistent across HER2+/hormone receptor-positive and negative subgroups (p < 0.001 and ≤ 0.012, respectively) and was not mitigated by adjuvant trastuzumab treatment (p ≤ 0.002). However, in HER2-negative BC, CD163+ TAM count did not significantly affect survival. The study highlights the importance of CD163+ TAMs as a prognostic marker in HER2+ BC, suggesting that therapies targeting macrophage function could be beneficial, particularly since the standard trastuzumab treatment does not counteract the adverse prognostic effect of high CD163+ TAM counts.