Smoking alters prostate cancer immune environment, CCRI study finds

Research conducted by the CCRI team — including instructors Dr. Amod Sharma and Dr. Sarabjeet Kour Sudan; assistant professor Dr. Pratim Guha Niyogi; Dr. Ajay Singh, professor and associate director of basic and translational research; and Dr. Seema Singh, professor and associate director of education and training — investigated how smoking affects the immune microenvironments of prostate tumors. 

Smoking is a modifiable risk factor for prostate cancer diagnosis, recurrence and death.

Although the cancer-causing effects of tobacco are well established, far less is known about how smoking alters the immune environment. Their research, published in the February issue of The Prostate, examines how smoking changes the immune landscape of prostate cancer and explores how those changes may be linked to patient survival. 

The researchers found that current smokers exhibited significantly greater infiltration of tumor-associated macrophages and regulatory T cells than nonsmokers.

Interestingly, former smokers exhibited a pattern similar to non-smokers. Further analysis revealed that a concomitant high TAM and Treg infiltration in the tumor microenvironment is significantly correlated with reduced overall survival.

This suggests that smoking creates an immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment, potentially facilitating rapid tumor growth and aggressive progression. Their data also suggests that smoking cessation may reverse some of these changes, highlighting the clinical significance of smoking behavior in disease outcomes.