Description
Previous reports suggest that outcome of cHL patients may be related to the tumor microenvironment, which in turn may be influenced by EBV infection. Gene profiling was used for further characterize the cHL microenvironment. A training set of 73 cHL tissue samples was profiled using Affymetrix DNA microarrays. Supervised analysis provided a gene signature separating EBV+ from EBV- cHL tissues, including genes characteristic of Th1 and antiviral response. Samples from patients with favourable outcome significantly overexpressed genes involved in the function of B-cells and plasmacytoid dendritic cells (pDCs), like BCL11A. A validation set of 146 cHL samples was analyzed using immunohistochemistry (IHC).