Back

Dynamic regulation of hierarchical heterogeneity in Acute Myeloid Leukemia serves as a tumor immunoevasion mechanism

Pospori, C.; Grey, W.; Gonzalez-Anton, S.; Gibson, S. V.; Georgiou, C.; Birch, F.; Stevens, G.; Williams, T.; Khorshed, R.; Haltalli, M. L. R.; Skoufou-Papoutsaki, M.-N.; Sloan, K.; Encabo, H. H.; Hopkins, J.; Christodoulidou, C.; Stampoulis, D.; Hearn-Yates, F.; Gribben, J.; Stauss, H. J.; Chakraverty, R.; Bonnet, D.; Lo Celso, C. L.

2020-12-22 cancer biology
10.1101/2020.12.21.414649 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Acute Myeloid Leukemia, a hematological malignancy with poor clinical outcome, is composed of hierarchically heterogeneous cells. We examine the contribution of this heterogeneity to disease progression in the context of anti-tumor immune responses and investigate whether these responses regulate the balance between stemness and differentiation in AML. Combining phenotypic analysis with proliferation dynamics and fate-mapping of AML cells in a murine AML model, we demonstrate the presence of a terminally differentiated, chemoresistant population expressing high levels of PDL1. We show that PDL1 upregulation in AML cells, following exposure to IFN{gamma} from activated T cells, is coupled with AML differentiation and the dynamic balance between proliferation, versus differentiation and immunosuppression, facilitates disease progression in the presence of immune responses. This microenvironment-responsive hierarchical heterogeneity in AML may be key in facilitating disease growth at the population level at multiple stages of disease, including following bone marrow transplantation and immunotherapy.

Matching journals

The top 5 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.