Inflammatory-associated myeloid dendritic cells reveals associations between chronic lung diseases and lung cancer

The high risk of patients with chronic lung diseases in developing into lung cancer has been recognised, but the key factors driving such procedure are still barely known. Dendritic cells (DCs) as major antigen presenting cells take part in the immune response in the very upstream, and myeloid DCs regulate the inflammation in pulmonary diseases. In this article, we performed single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) analyses on DCs from pulmonary diseases. We explore the DC characteristics in chronic lung diseases, lung cancer and healthy control samples. We discover that a special type of DC, which is highly associated with inflammatory, inf-DC, is abundant in lung cancer samples. Furthermore, we find that there are about 10% patients with chronic lung diseases also has such inf-DC-rich pattern. Such proportion is consistent to the fact that about 10% chronic lung disease patients finally developed into cancer. Our findings indicate inf-DC could be a potential factor to predict the risk of chronic lung disease developing into cancer. HEADLIGHTS:1. DCs were divided into non-inf DCs and inf-DCs based on their expression features of IRF8 and pro-inflammatory cytokines and chemokines.2. The percentages of inf-DC in patients from cancer were all 100%.3. cDC2 interacted more actively with lymphocytes than cDC1 and mature-DC; inf-DC interacted more actively with lymphocytes than non-inf DC.4. All the three inf-DC showed a general inflammation program. image