Functional impairment in circulating and intrahepatic NK cells and relative mechanism in hepatocellular carcinoma patients

Functional defects in natural killer (NK) cells have been proposed to be responsible for the failure of anti-tumor immune responses. Whether and how NK cells are impaired in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients remain unknown. In this study, we found that HCC patients displayed a dramatic reduction in peripheral CD56dimCD16pos NK subsets compared with healthy subjects. A significant reduction of CD56dimCD16pos NK subsets was also found in tumor regions compared with non-tumor regions in the livers of these HCC patients. Both these peripheral and tumor-infiltrating NK cells exhibited poorer capacity to produce IFN-γ and kill K562 targets, which was further found to be associated with increased CD4+CD25+ T regulatory cells as we previously-described in HCC patients. Addition of Tregs from HCC patients efficiently inhibited the anti-tumor ability of autologous NK cells in vitro. These findings are helpful for understanding the mechanism of NK cell-mediated anti-tumor immune responses in HCC patients.