Single-Cell RNAseq Profiling of Human γδ T Lymphocytes in Virus-Related Cancers and COVID-19 Disease
Résumé
The detailed characterization of human γδ T lymphocytes at the single-cell transcriptomic level in tumors and patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) requires both a reference differentiation trajectory of γδ T cells and a robust mapping method for additional γδ T lymphocytes. Here, we incepted such a method to characterize thousands of γδ T lymphocytes from (n=95) patients with cancer or adult and pediatric COVID-19 disease. We found that cancer patients with human papillomavirus-positive head and neck squamous cell carcinoma and Epstein-Barr virus-positive Hodgkin’s lymphoma have γδ tumor-infiltrating T lymphocytes that are more prone to recirculate from the tumor and avoid exhaustion. In COVID-19, both TCRVγ9 and TCRVγnon9 subsets of γδ T lymphocytes relocalize from peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) to the infected lung tissue, where their advanced differentiation, tissue residency, and exhaustion reflect T cell activation. Although severe COVID-19 increases both recruitment and exhaustion of γδ T lymphocytes in infected lung lesions but not blood, the anti-IL6R therapy with Tocilizumab promotes γδ T lymphocyte differentiation in patients with COVID-19. PBMC from pediatric patients with COVID-19 display similar γδ T cell lymphopenia to that seen in adult patients. However, blood γδ T cells from children with the COVID-19-related multi-system inflammatory syndrome are not lymphodepleted, but they are differentiated as in healthy PBMC. These findings suggest that some virus-induced memory γδ T lymphocytes durably persist in the blood of adults, and could subsequently infiltrate and recirculate in tumors.
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