Marco Donia: Biological and Clinical Significance of TILs in Immunotherapy
“Biological and Clinical Significance of Tumor-Infiltrating Lymphocytes (TILs) in Immunotherapy (Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology, Miguel López de Rodas Gregorio et al., Jan 2025).
Key Highlights:
Role of TILs in Immunotherapy:
- TILs play a central role in tumor elimination facilitated by immunotherapy.
- Emerging evidence suggests TIL abundance and specific functional profiles may predict immunotherapy responses.
Challenges in Utilizing TILs as Biomarkers:
- Lack of standardized definitions and quantification methods limits their clinical application.
- TIL metrics like spatial distribution, functional states, and antigen specificity remain underexplored.
Technological Advances:
Tools like single-cell transcriptomics, proteomics, and AI-powered spatial analyses are enabling deeper insights into the role of TILs
Take-Home:
- The multidimensional nature of TILs—combining abundance, location, antigen specificity, and functional state—provides a promising avenue for developing predictive (for immunotherapy) and prognostic biomarkers .
- Future clinical trials integrating standardized TIL analysis could refine patient stratification and therapeutic strategies.
Clinical Implications:
- Efforts to standardize TIL evaluation could pave the way for their inclusion as routine biomarkers in oncology.
- Longitudinal studies are crucial to understand TIL dynamics during therapy and their impact on outcomes.
Open Questions:
- Can spatially resolved TIL metrics predict responses across diverse cancers?
- What is the interplay between TIL subsets and resistance mechanisms in ICI therapy?
Disclaimer: Excellent paper, that I had the pleasure to review (disclosed peer-review at the bottom of the paper, nice feature recently implemented by Nature journal family).
Figure 3 of the manuscript: Associations of TILs with ICI treatment outcomes in patients with solid tumours.”
Authors: Miguel Lopez de Rodas, Maria Villalba-Esparza, Miguel Sanmamed, Lieping Chen, David Rimm Kurt Schalper.
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