ESMO Immuno-Oncology 2025 | Residual immune microenvironment predicts relapse risk in early TNBC
Abhishek Garg, PhD, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium, explores how the residual tumour immune microenvironment shapes relapse risk in early-stage triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) following neoadjuvant immunotherapy plus chemotherapy. Lipid-associated macrophages were identified as key modulators of relapse risk. Their abundance in tumour tissue and blood correlates with residual cancer burden, suggesting potential as a minimally invasive biomarker and for refining immune-informed relapse risk stratification in patients with TNBC. This interview took place at 2025 European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Immuno-Oncology Congress in London, UK.
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Transcript
This study is quite interesting, actually. It takes a very balanced approach from, again, an immune angle in TNBC, which is challenging from also an immunotherapy perspective. Although initially it was said that immunotherapy should upfront respond, or patients upfront should respond in this setting, it has not been as easy. So for example, chemotherapy was required together with PD-1...
This study is quite interesting, actually. It takes a very balanced approach from, again, an immune angle in TNBC, which is challenging from also an immunotherapy perspective. Although initially it was said that immunotherapy should upfront respond, or patients upfront should respond in this setting, it has not been as easy. So for example, chemotherapy was required together with PD-1. And again, this connects back to my initial point that breast cancer is considered sometimes as a hot tumor and TNBC the same, but these quantitative hot or cold definitions, they don’t really survive qualitative scrutiny. The T-cells might be there for reasons that we do not know, especially in human contexts where tumors have developed over a very long amount of time. People don’t realize that a lot of other things add into it, including the fact that there are T-cells hanging around there just because they think that something is wrong in the tissue, but then they don’t actually have any specificity for the tumor. I think this problem applies quite well to breast cancer, for instance. So that’s something I will kind of give a discussion to based on this very nice abstract, because they do see some of these issues that apply to breast cancer in a clinical setting.
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