Figure 5.

MerTK induces anti-PD-L1 resistance by favoring a protumor microenvironment

(A) Relationship between overall survival and CTL levels in HCC patients with low and high MerTK gene copy numbers.

(B) The correlations between the mRNA expression levels of MerTK and cytotoxic CD8⁺ T cells.

(C) The representative image of HCC tissue stained with MerTK (red), CD8 (gold), CD11b (purple), CD15 (green), and CD14 (pink).

(D–G) (D) The percentage statistical analysis of CD8⁺ T cells (E) MDSCs, (F) gMDSCs, and (G) mMDSCs in tumor tissues.

(H) The correlation analysis between the expression of MerTK and the enrichment of MDSCs.

(I and J) T-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) plot of tumor-infiltrating leukocytes overlaid with color-coded clusters and the frequency of clusters of the indicated immune cell subsets, including CD3⁺ T cells, CD8⁺ T cells, IFNγ⁺CD8⁺ T cells, CD4⁺ T cells, CD11b⁺ cells, and MDSCs in Hepa1-6, Hepa1-6-OE-MerTK, Res1-6, and Res1-6-shMerTK subcutaneous tumor model treated with anti-PD-L1 or IgG (left) and the statistical analysis (right).

All results are shown as mean ± SEM (n = 5). One- or two-way ANOVA was used to analyze the data; ∗p < 0.05, ∗∗p < 0.01, and ∗∗∗p < 0.001.