Simultaneous and Spatially-Resolved Analysis of T-Lymphocytes, Macrophages and PD-L1 Immune Checkpoint in Rare Cancers

Abstract

Penile, vulvar and anal neoplasms show an incidence lower than 0.5% of the population per year and therefore can be considered as rare cancers but with a dramatic impact on quality of life and survival. This work describes the experience of a Chilean cancer center using multiplexed immunofluorescence to study a case series of four penile cancers, two anal cancers and one vulvar cancer and simultaneous detection of CD8, CD68, PD-L1, Cytokeratin and Ki-67 in FFPE samples. Fluorescent image analyses were performed using open sources for automated tissue segmentation and cell phenotyping. Our results showed an objective and reliable counting of objects with a single or combined labeling or within a specific tissue compartment. The variability was below 10%, and the correlation between analytical events was 0.92–0.97. Critical cell phenotypes, such as TILs, PD-L1+ or proliferative tumor cells were detected in a supervised and unsupervised manner with a limit of detection of less than 1% of relative abundance. Finally, the observed diversity and abundance of the different cell phenotypes within the tumor microenvironment for the three studied tumor types confirmed that our methodology is useful and robust to be applicable for many other solid tumors.