Exploration of the Immune Landscape of EBV-associated Gastric Cancers
Abstract
Epstein–Barr virus (EBV) is a gammaherpesvirus associated with 9% of all gastric cancers (GCs). EBV-associated GCs (EBVaGCs) are pathologically and clinically distinct entities from EBV-negative GCs (EBVnGCs), with EBVaGCs exhibiting differential molecular pathology and patient prognosis. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the tumor microenvironment (TME) of EBVaGCs, which has not been explored in-depth. We hypothesize that EBVaGCs and EBVnGCs are also distinct in terms of the molecular immune landscape. We employed over 400 stomach adenocarcinoma (STAD) samples from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), as well as a single cell dataset, for the construction of a web suite of tools exploring multimodal data for GCs, and the exploration of changes in the TME of EBVaGCs and cellular phenotypes overrepresented in EBVaGCs. Our findings confirm the distinctness of EBVaGCs and EBVnGCs, with EBV-positive status possibly being a potential biomarker for the application of immunotherapy in GC.