Recovery of Immunoglobulin VJ Recombinations from Pancreatic Cancer Exome Files Strongly Correlates with Reduced Survival.

We assessed pancreatic cancer, lymphocyte infiltrates with a computational genomics approach. We took advantage of tumor-specimen exome files available from the cancer genome atlas to mine T- and B-cell immune receptor recombinations, using highly efficient, scripted algorithms established in several previous reports. Surprisingly, the results indicated that pancreatic cancer exomes represent one of the highest level yields for immune receptor recombinations, significantly higher than two comparison cancers used in this study, head and neck and bladder cancer. In particular, pancreatic cancer exomes have very large numbers of immunoglobulin light chain recombinations, both with regard to number of samples characterized by recovery of such recombinations and with regard to numbers of recombination reads per sample. These results were consistent with B-cell biomarkers, which emphasized the Th2 nature of the pancreatic lymphocyte infiltrate. The tumor specimen exomes with B-cell immune receptor recombination reads represented a dramatically poor outcome, a result not detected with either the head and neck or bladder cancer datasets. The results presented here support the potential value of immunotherapies designed to engineer a Th2 to Th1 shift in treating certain forms of pancreatic cancer.