Immune Characteristics of Chinese Diffuse Large B-Cell Lymphoma Patients: Implications for Cancer Immunotherapies

Immunotherapeutic agents have demonstrated encouraging signs of clinical utility in non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The goal of this study is to analyze the immune characteristics of Chinese patients with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) to inform the development of immunotherapies in this patient population. Tumor samples from 211 DLBCL patients were analyzed for cell of origin (COO) and immune characteristics using the NanoString platform as well as MYC protein expression through immunohistochemistry. Lower incidence of the germinal center B-cell (GCB) subtype (93/211, 44.1%) was observed in this cohort. Compared to the GCB subtype, the activated B-cell (ABC) subtype was associated with significantly increased expression of multiple pro-inflammatory gene signatures and decreased expression of anti-inflammatory gene signatures. Instead of affecting the pro-inflammatory genes, MYC protein overexpression showed a negative correlation with the expression of T-cell receptor (TCR) and T regulatory genes as well as the OX40 gene. Regardless of COO, higher PD-L1 or IDO1 gene expression correlated with increased expression of T effector and Interferon-γ gene signatures while the expression of multiple oncogenes including ACTR3B, ERBB2, AKT2 and SMARCD1 was down-regulated. Our findings may thus be helpful in guiding further development of immunotherapies for the different subsets of Chinese DLBCL patients.