This article details a comprehensive spatial immune profiling study focusing on adult-type diffuse gliomas, which are often considered immunologically "cold" tumors. Researchers identified tertiary lymphoid structures (TLSs) in 15% of these gliomas and further characterized them into three distinct subtypes: T-low-TLS, B:T-TLS, and PC-TLS (plasma cell rich). The study demonstrates that functional TLS maturation in gliomas, particularly the B:T-TLS and PC-TLS subtypes, involves clonal lymphocyte expansion, plasma cell formation, and interactions between cytotoxic T cells and dendritic cells. Crucially, the presence of these functional TLSs is strongly associated with improved overall patient survival, suggesting they represent an immune-permissive tumor microenvironment and may serve as a critical prognostic and predictive biomarker for immunotherapy susceptibility in a subset of glioma patients.
References:
- Cakmak P, Lun J H, Singh A, et al. Spatial immune profiling defines a subset of human gliomas with functional tertiary lymphoid structures[J]. Immunity, 2025.
