IL-7 is expressed in malignant mesothelioma and has a prognostic value

Malignant pleural mesothelioma (MPM) is an aggressive cancer mainly related to asbestos exposure. Despite recent therapeutic advances, notably immunotherapies, the benefit remains limited and restricted to a small percentage of patients. Thus, a better understanding of the disease is needed to identify new therapeutic strategies. Recently, interleukin 7 receptor (IL-7R) has been described as being expressed by MPM cells and associated with poorer patient survival. Thus, the aim of this work was to study the IL-7R/IL-7 pathway in MPM using patient samples. We found that, although more than 40% of MPM cells expressed IL-7R, IL-7 had no effect on their intracellular signaling. Accordingly, the addition of IL-7 to the culture medium did not affect MPM cell growth. Using The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database, we showed that high IL7 gene expression in MPM tumors was associated with a higher overall patient survival and an induction of genes involved in the immune response. In pleural effusions (PEs), we found that IL-7 concentration was not a good diagnostic biomarker. However, we observed that high IL-7 levels in PEs were associated with shorter survival of MPM patients, but not of lung cancer patients. The prognostic value of IL-7 was also conserved when only patients with epithelioid mesothelioma, the most common histological type of MPM, were analyzed. Taken together, our study suggests that, although the IL-7R/IL-7 signaling pathway is not functional in MPM cells, IL-7 expression in PEs may have prognostic value in MPM patients.