Abstract

Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) has the highest percentage of lymphocytic infiltration among breast cancer subtypes, and TNBC patients may benefit from anti-PD-1/PD-L1 immunotherapy. However, some cases whether the immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) shows low targeting efficiency have occurred and effective synergistic targets need to be found, which inspired our exploration of the co-expression analysis of MCT4 (SLC16A3) and PD-L1 (CD274) and their potential regulatory mechanisms. After bioinformatic analysis of the relationship between MCT4 and PD-L1, we validated their positive co-expression relationship in triple-negative breast cancer through multiple immunohistochemical staining (mIHC), CRISPR/Cas9, and lentiviral transduction for MCT4 knockout (sgMCT4/231 KO) or overexpression (pEGFP-N1-MCT4/231). We examined the effect of lactate treatment on PD-L1 expression in triple-negative breast cancer cells by qRT-PCR and Western blot. Combined with our results, we found that MCT4 positively regulated PD-L1 expression through discharging lactate and stabilized PD-L1 through promoting its glycosylation by the classic WNT pathway in MDA-MB-231 cells. More importantly, the high co-expression of MCT4 and PD-L1 appears to predict more effective targets for treating TNBC, which would improve immune checkpoint therapy for TNBC.