Background: Chemokines are involved in the chemotaxis of immune cells, angiogenesis, and cancer progression. For several tumor entities, it has been shown that the expression of chemokine receptors CCR7 and CXCR5 is of prognostic relevance. However, their role in the development of sinonasal cancer is currently not understood.
Patients and Methods: This work aimed to examine the relevance of chemokine receptor expression of CXCR5 and CXCR7 in sinonasal squamous cell carcinoma and adenocarcinoma and investigate a possible prognostic role. Tissue sections of 56 patients suffering from sinonasal cancers (squamous cell carcinoma and adenocarcinoma n = 41/15) were immunohistochemically stained for CCR7 and CXCR5. Afterwards, slides were evaluated by an immune scoring model.
Results: CCR7 expression was more abundant in squamous cell carcinoma than in adenocarcinoma (5.43 points vs. 2.38 points; p < 0.001). There was no significant correlation between CCR7 or CXCR5 expression and age, histological type, grading, TNM status, UICC classification, recurrence, and event of distant metastasis. We neither detected any effect of CCR7 nor CXCR5 on survival.
Conclusion: CXCR5 and CCR7 may play an important role in the tumor microenvironment signaling in various tumors including those of the head and neck region and are mostly associated with an impaired prognosis. However, this does not seem to be the case in the investigated subtypes of sinonasal cancer.