Expression of ICOSL is associated with decreased survival in invasive breast cancer

Bin Wang; Huayong Jiang; Tingyang Zhou; Ning Ma; Wei Liu; Yajie Wang; Li Zuo

doi:10.7717/peerj.6903

Expression of ICOSL is associated with decreased survival in invasive breast cancer

PeerJ. 2019 May 16:7:e6903. doi: 10.7717/peerj.6903. eCollection 2019.

Authors

Bin Wang^#¹, Huayong Jiang^#², Tingyang Zhou^{3

4}, Ning Ma⁵, Wei Liu⁶, Yajie Wang¹, Li Zuo^{3

4

7}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Oncology, Changhai Hospital, the Second Military Medical University, Shanghai, China.
² Department of Radiation Oncology, The 7th Medical Center of PLA General Hospital, Beijing, China.
³ Radiologic Sciences and Respiratory Therapy Division, School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, The Ohio State University College of Medicine, Columbus, OH, USA.
⁴ Interdisciplinary Biophysics Graduate Program, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA.
⁵ Clinical Laboratory, 905th Hospital of PLA, Shanghai, China.
⁶ Department of Radiation Oncology, Mayo Clinic Arizona, Pheonix, AZ, USA.
⁷ College of Arts and Sciences, University of Maine Presque Isle Campus, ME, USA.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

Background: Inducible co-stimulator (ICOS) is a CD28-related molecule exclusively expressed on activated T cells and plays a critical role in modulating the immune response in breast cancer. The blockage of ICOS pathway has been shown to inhibit the activity of Type 2 T helper cells, thus potentially protecting against cancer growth. The current study aims to investigate the correlation between inducible co-stimulator ligand (ICOSL) expression in tumor tissues and the prognoses of patients with invasive breast cancer.

Methods: Tumor samples from 562 Chinese patients with invasive breast carcinomas were collected between 2003 and 2010. The expression of ICOSL on breast tumor and adjacent non-cancerous tissue was determined via immunohistochemistry. The overall survival (OS) of patients with positive and negative ICOSL expression were described using Kaplan-Meier curves, respectively. Parametric correlation method was used to analyze the correlation between ICOSL expression and other clinicopathological parameters. ICOSL was selected as a dependent variable for multivariate analysis.

Results: Positive ICOSL expression was identified on the plasma membrane in both cytoplasm and the nucleus of breast cancer cells. Membrane-expressed ICOSL is determined as an independent prognostic factor for OS in breast cancer but without significantly correlating with other clinicopathologic parameters such as age, menopausal status, depth of invasion, lymph node metastasis status, histologic classification, etc.

Conclusion: Our study suggests that the up-regulated expression of ICOSL protein in breast tumor cells can be associated with poor prognoses in invasive breast carcinomas.

Keywords: ICOSL; Invasive breast cancer; Prognosis.

Grants and funding

This work was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China, NSFC No. 81472479 to Bin Wang and by 2016 American Physiology Society S&R Foundation Ryuji Ueno Award Fund to Li Zuo. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.