Peripheral blood TCR clonotype diversity as an age-associated marker of breast cancer progression (blood)

Immune escape is a prerequisite of tumor growth. We previously described a decline in intratumor activated GZMB+CD8+ T cells and T cell receptor (TCR) clonotype diversity in invasive compared to in situ (DCIS) breast carcinomas implying a role for decreasing TCR diversity in tumor progression. Here, we evaluated peripheral blood TCR clonotype diversity in breast cancer patients diagnosed with DCIS or de novo stage IV disease at different ages. We found that peripheral TCR diversity is associated with clinicopathologic, and peripheral immune status and it correlates with the frequency of CD8+ T cells in DCIS of young patients. These results provide new insights to the role of host immunity and breast cancer development in different aged women. To identify the immune repertoire of the Bulk RNA seq data of 93 patients we ran the fastq files through RIMA that generates a raw counts and transcript per million file. Ran the Bayes Prism deconvolution method to identify the immune cell repertoire of the Bulk RNA seq data and performed clustering analysis, differential gene expression analysis and GSEA to identify the significant differences across the Chao1 high and Low patients and different age groups.