Reduced immunogenicity of MYC amplified, metastatic prostate cancer
Sunny Kahlon 1, Vayda R. Barker 1, Mallika Varkhedi 1, Alex Y. Wang 1, Taha I. Huda 1 and George Blanck 1, 2
1 Department of Molecular Medicine, Morsani College of Medicine, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL 33612, USA
2 Department of Immunology, H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute, Tampa, FL 33612, USA
Correspondence to:
George Blanck, email: gblanck@usf.edu
Keywords: prostate cancer; MYC amplification; adaptive immune receptor recombinations; reduced immunogenicity; RNAseq files
Received: April 08, 2025 Accepted: January 27, 2026 Published: February 07, 2026
Copyright: © 2026 Kahlon et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
ABSTRACT
Objectives: Through a genomics-based approach analyzing gene expression levels and adaptive immune receptor recombinations, we sought to determine whether MYC amplification was associated with a worse outcome and reduced immunogenicity.
Methods: MYC copy numbers and the presence of adaptive immune receptor (IR) recombination sequencing reads were quantified in genomics files representing prostate cancer samples.
Results: Our results showed that increased MYC amplification was found in metastatic stages of prostate cancer. Furthermore, increased MYC amplification was not only associated with worse progression-free survival but also with reduced immunogenicity in metastatic tumors, as determined by the recovery of a reduced numbers of adaptive IR recombination sequencing reads from tumor RNAseq and tumor whole genome sequence files.
Conclusions: MYC amplification is associated with reduced tumor immunogenicity as assessed by the recovery of IR recombination reads from prostate cancer genomics files.
PII: 644
