Publications

Disrupted priming within draining lymph nodes drives immune quiescence in gastric cancer

Sohrab Salehi, Emily Stroobant, Hannah Lees, Ya-Hui Lin, Shoji Shimada, Miseker Abate, Matthew Zatzman, Nicholas Ceglia, Samuel Freeman, Monika Laszkowska, Steven Maron, Andrew McPherson, Nicole Rusk, Eliyahu Havasov, Harrison Drebin, Ping Gu, Laura Tang, Yelena Janjigian, Ruslan Soldatov, Ronan Chaligne, Sohrab Shah, Vivian Strong, Santosha Vardhana

bioRxiv 2025.05.05.651897.

Abstract

The gastric mucosa is characterized by continuous innate immune surveillance and inflammatory signaling, yet a high proportion of gastric carcinomas (GCs) are recalcitrant to immune-directed therapies. The mechanisms by which GCs evade adaptive immune surveillance within the highly antigenic microenvironment of the gastric mucosa remains unknown. To address this, we collected patient-matched tumor tissue, distant normal tissue, metastasis, and draining lymph nodes to generate a large-scale single-cell immune profiling dataset from 64 patients (n=179 samples, >150,000 cells). From single cell analysis, we identified two distinct sources of impaired tumor surveillance within tumor draining lymph nodes. First, we observed that a significant fraction of tumor draining lymph nodes had undergone cytokine-driven reprogramming, leading to reduced dendritic cell homing and limited T cell priming. Second, T cells undergoing successful activation exhibited limited expansion and constrained differentiation, marked by expression of the quiescence-associated transcription factor Kruppel-like Factor 2 (KLF2). Overexpression of KLF2 in primary T cells limited both their differentiation and cytotoxic capacity. These findings implicate both impaired T cell priming and KLF2-dependent T cell quiescence in limiting T cell immunity in gastric adenocarcinoma. We suggest these findings represent an emerging model for immune silencing in tumors developing from tissues with chronic inflammation.