Immune evasion might affect survival in laryngeal cancer patients with blood group O

© The Author(s) 2017. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/ publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. To The Editor, I want to congratulate Jin and colleagues for their article entitled “ABO blood group is a predictor of survival in patients with laryngeal cancer” recently reported in Chinese Journal of Cancer, in which they assessed whether the ABO blood group was associated with prognosis in patients with laryngeal cancer [1]. They reported that compared with the patients with blood group non-O, patients with blood group O had significantly shorter OS. However, there is no satisfactory explanation why laryngeal cancer patients with blood group O had shorter OS. Blood group antigens are expressed on the surface of red blood cells and numerous other tissues throughout the body, including different types of cancer cells as well [2]. These A or B antigens located on laryngeal cancer cell surface may be recognized from the immune system as antigenic foci. Hence, laryngeal cancer cells carrying A or B or both antigens could be destroyed by the immune system. On the other hand, laryngeal cancer cells harboring neither A nor B antigens, so-called type O cancer cells may not be recognized by immune cells and therefore may escape from immune destruction. Therefore, laryngeal cancer patients with blood group O might have shorter OS through the mechanism of immune evasion. This proposal has to be validated in further studies. I confirm that I have read BioMed Central’s guidance on competing interests. I have no competing interests in the manuscript.