The interaction of p53 and DNA repair gene mutations and their impact on tumor mutation burden and immune response in human malignancies.

P53 suppresses tumorigenesis through multiple cellular functions/mechanisms, including genomic stability surveillance. Recently, it has also be reported for its role in cancer immune response modulation. Deficiency in DNA repair pathways lead to the accumulation of genomic alterations and tumor mutation burden and in consequence resulting in the activation of immune response. We investigated the interaction of p53 and DNA repair gene mutations and their impact on tumor mutation burden and immune response in human malignancies by mining cBioPortal data of a range of human cancers. We found that in the majority of human cancers, p53 mutations are equally distributed between DNA repair gene mutation positive and negative cases and in a number of human cancers, p53 and DNA repair gene mutations have a tendency of co-occurrence. Only in colorectal cancer, there is a tendency of 'mutual exclusivity' of mutations in p53 and DNA repair genes. In most tumors, p53 and DNA repair gene mutations have synergistic/additive effect in increasing tumor mutation burden, but not in colorectal cancer where they are mutually exclusive. The impact of p53 and DNA repair gene mutations and their interaction on tumor microenvironment immune cells are complex and tumor type specific and not always correlated with tumor mutation burden. In colorectal cancers, these two types of mutations resulted in similar immune cell subpopulation changes and in tumors where the mutations have a tendency of co-occurrence, p53 showed dominant roles on immune response, although they can also counter-act each other for their effect on certain immune cell subtypes. AJCR