Monitoring the responsiveness of T and antigen presenting cell compartments in breast cancer patients is useful to predict clinical tumor response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy

BACKGROUND: Vaccination of mice with tumors treated with Doxorubicin promotes a T cell immunity that relies on dendritic cell (DC) activation and is responsible for tumor control in vaccinated animals. Despite Doxorubicin in combination with Cyclophosphamide (A/C) is widely used to treat breast cancer patients, the stimulating effect of A/C on T and APC compartments and its correlation with patient’s clinical response remains to be proved. METHODS: In this prospective study, we designed an in vitro system to monitor various immunological readouts in PBMCs obtained from a total of 17 breast cancer patients before, and after neoadjuvant anti-tumor therapy with A/C. RESULTS: The results show that before treatment, T cells and DCs, exhibit a marked unresponsiveness to in vitro stimulus: whereas T cells exhibit poor TCR internalization and limited expression of CD154 in response to anti-CD3/CD28/CD2 stimulation, DCs secrete low levels of IL-12p70 and limited CD83 expression in response to pro-inflammatory cytokines. Notably, after treatment the responsiveness of T and APC compartments was recovered, and furthermore, this recovery correlated with patients’ residual cancer burden stage. CONCLUSIONS: Our results let us to argue that the model used here to monitor the T and APC compartments is suitable to survey the recovery of immune surveillance and to predict tumor response during A/C chemotherapy. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12885-017-3982-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.