Purpose: Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is a breast cancer subtype that has poor prognosis and exhibits a unique tumor microenvironment. Analysis of the tumor microbiome has indicated a relationship between the tumor microenvironment and treatment response. Therefore, we attempted to reveal the role of the tumor microbiome in patients with TNBC receiving neoadjuvant chemotherapy.
Materials and methods: We collected TNBC patient RNA-sequencing samples from the Gene Expression Omnibus and extracted microbiome count data. Differential and relative abundance were estimated with linear discriminant analysis effect size. We calculated the immune cell fraction with CIBERSORTx and conducted survival analysis using the Cancer Genome Atlas patient data. Correlations between the microbiome and immune cell compositions were analyzed and a prediction model was constructed to estimate drug response.
Results: Among the pathological complete response group (pCR), the beta diversity varied considerably; consequently, 20 genera and 24 species were observed to express a significant differential and relative abundance. Pandoraea pulmonicola and Brucella melitensis were found to be important features in determining drug response. In correlation analysis, Geosporobacter ferrireducens, Streptococcus sanguinis, and resting natural killer cells were the most correlated factors in the pCR, whereas Nitrosospira briensis, Plantactinospora sp. BC1, and regulatory T cells were key features in the residual disease group.
Conclusion: Our study demonstrated that the microbiome analysis of tumor tissue can predict chemotherapy response of patients with TNBC. Further, the immunological tumor microenvironment may be impacted by the tumor microbiome, thereby affecting the corresponding survival and treatment response.
Keywords: Microbiota; Neoadjuvant therapy; Triple-negative breast neoplasms.