Colorectal Cancer Immune Infiltrates: Significance in Patient Prognosis and Immunotherapeutic Efficacy

Colorectal cancer occurrence and progression involve multiple aspects of host immune deficiencies. In these events, immune cells vary their phenotypes and functions over time, thus enabling the immune microenvironment to be ‘tumour-inhibiting’ as well as ‘tumour-promoting’ as a whole. Because of the association of tumouricidal T cell infiltration with favourable survival in cancer patients, the Immunoscore system was established. Critically, the tumoural Immunoscore serves as an indicator of CRC patient prognosis independent of patient TNM stage and suggests that patients with high Immunoscores in their tumours have prolonged survival in general. Accordingly, stratifications according to tumoural Immunoscores provide new insights into CRC in terms of comparing disease severity, forecasting disease progression, and making treatment decisions. An important application of this system will be to shed light on candidate selection in immunotherapy for CRC, because the T cells responsible for determining the Immunoscore serve as responders to immune checkpoint inhibitors. However, the Immunoscore system merely provides a standard procedure for identifying the tumoural infiltration of cytotoxic and memory T cells, while information concerning the survival and function of these cells is still absent. Moreover, other infiltrates, such as dendritic cells, macrophages and B cells, can still influence CRC prognosis, implying that those might also influence the therapeutic efficacy of immune checkpoint inhibitors. On these bases, this review is designed to introduce the Immunoscore system by presenting its clinical significance and application in CRC.