Nature 567, 479–485 (2019)

The local immune microenvironment of a tumor shapes that tumor’s route of immune escape.

The extent to which local tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes influence the evolution of a cancer through immune editing of neoantigens is not known.

Researchers from the TRACER-x consortium based in the United Kingdom analyzed 258 regions from 88 early-stage, untreated non-small-cell lung cancers and identified the immune cells, cancer mutations and epigenetic marks in these regions. They found the patterns of evolution of the tumor regions were highly localized depending on immune environment and took no one set route. The routes to immune evasion also could be used to make a prognosis prediction.