Clinical verification of the relationship between smoking and the immune microenvironment of breast cancer

BACKGROUND: The immune tumor microenvironment (iTME) is thought to affect the response to chemotherapy, and tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) are often used as an indicator to evaluate the iTME. Smoking is involved in carcinogenesis, the relationship between smoking and the iTME of lung cancer has been reported. We hypothesized that smoking would affect the iTME of breast cancer and aimed to examine this relationship based on the amount of pre-diagnosis smoking and the subsequent effects on treatment response and prognosis. METHODS: This retrospective study evaluated data from 149 patients who underwent preoperative chemotherapy for triple-negative or HER2-enriched breast cancer. TILs were assessed in biopsy specimens at diagnosis. The data of all patients were used to calculate each patient’s smoking amount based on pack-years. RESULTS: Relative to the low smoking group, the high smoking group had a significant greater TILs density (p = 0.043) and a significantly better pathological complete response (pCR) rate (p = 0.042). However, there was no significant difference according to smoking amount in disease-free survival (p = 0.114) or overall survival (p = 0.347). CONCLUSIONS: Smoking may influence the iTME, with an activated iTME being associated with pCR rate. Therefore, controlled activation of the microenvironment in this setting may help improve patients’ prognosis. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12967-019-1773-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.