Abstract 1543: Tumor associated macrophages are associated with poor survival in epithelial ovarian cancer.

Proceedings: AACR 104th Annual Meeting 2013; Apr 6-10, 2013; Washington, DC Background Tumor associated macrophages have been associated with poor outcomes in several solid tumors, but their impact on the outcome of patients with epithelial ovarian cancer has not been well established. Methods We constructed a tissue microarray of 142 epithelial ovarian cancer specimens. Immunohistochemistry was performed for the presence of CD68+ macrophages. The distribution of macrophages was evaluated separately in tumor and stromal tissue. Clinical characteristics were recorded and presence or absence of intratumoral macrophages was correlated with clinical characteristics including survival. Results Median follow-up for the entire cohort was 32.0 months (range, 1.7-170 months), and median progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS) were 14.1 months and 47.8 months, respectively. Intratumoral macrophages (ITMs) were present in 132/142 patients (91.5%) and absent in 12/142 (8.5%). Patients whose tumor tissue did not contain ITMs had a significantly longer median PFS (not reached, p = 0.009) and median OS (150.1 months, p=0.03), compared with the median PFS and OS of 11.7 and 47.7 months, respectively, among patients with ITMs. Interestingly, we could not demonstrate differences in PFS and OS when stromal macrophages were evaluated separately. The presence of ITMs was an independent prognostic factor for OS in a multivariate analysis (p=0.009). The Cox proportional hazard ratios for presence of ITMs were 3.55 for PFS (95% CI, 1.38-12.13) and 3.62 for OS (95% CI, 1.33-13.08). Conclusions Our study shows that the presence of intratumoral but not stromal macrophages correlates with poor prognosis in epithelial ovarian carcinoma. Citation Format: Wafic El Masri, Caroline Hillerup, Charlotte Topka, Chintda Santiskulvong, Alexander Chiang, Lily Wu, Jianyu Rao, Oliver Dorigo. Tumor associated macrophages are associated with poor survival in epithelial ovarian cancer. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 104th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research; 2013 Apr 6-10; Washington, DC. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2013;73(8 Suppl):Abstract nr 1543. doi:10.1158/1538-7445.AM2013-1543