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Research Paper|Volume 12, Issue 3|pp 2747—2763

Single-cell RNA sequencing of immune cells in gastric cancer patients

Kai Fu1, Bingqing Hui2, Qian Wang1, Chen Lu1, Weihong Shi3, Zhigang Zhang4, Dawei Rong1, Betty Zhang5, Zhaofeng Tian6, Weiwei Tang1, Hongyong Cao1, Xuehao Wang7, Ziyi Chen7
  • 1Department of General Surgery, Nanjing First Hospital, Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, China
  • 2Department of Oncology, The First Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, China
  • 3Jiangsu Research Center for Primary Health Development and General Education, Jiangsu Vocational College of Medicine, Yancheng, China
  • 4Department of General Surgery, Zhongda Hospital, Medical School, Southeast University, Nanjing, China
  • 5Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada
  • 6Department of Laboratory Diagnostics, Changhai Hospital, Second Military Medical University, Shanghai, China
  • 7Hepatobiliary/Liver Transplantation Center, The First Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, Key Laboratory of Living Donor Transplantation, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, Nanjing, China
* Equal contribution
Received: November 13, 2019Accepted: January 12, 2020Published: February 10, 2020

Copyright: © 2020 Fu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Cancer immunotherapy has achieved positive clinical responses in the treatment of various cancers, including gastric cancer (GC). In this study, we characterized the heterogeneity of T cells isolated from GC patients at the single-cell level using single-cell RNA sequencing. We identified different immune cell subtypes and their heterogeneous transcription factors and depicted their developmental trajectories. In particular, we focused on exhausted CD8+ cells and Tregs and discovered that, as compared to control, the IRF8 transcription factor was downregulated in CD8+ tumour-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) from GC tissues, and that GC patients with lower IRF8 levels in blood CD8+ T cells tended to be a at a more advanced disease stage. These findings provide a theoretical basis for targeted immune therapy in GC.