Fig. 4: Non-LGLL T cell populations are more mature, clonal, and cytotoxic in T-LGLL compared with T cells of healthy controls and patients with other cancers.

a UMAP representations of non-leukemic CD45⁺ sorted cells from 11 T-LGLL, 6 healthy, 4 CML, 4 CLL, 2 RCC, and 1 NSCLC samples profiled from peripheral blood with 10X technologies, where different colors indicate clusters. Density estimates showing the overlapping dots for each cohort are presented on the right. b Differentially abundant non-leukemic clusters (from panel a) between patients with T-LGLL (n = 9) and patients with other cancers (n = 11, upper panel) and T-LGLL and with blood cancers (n = 8, lower panel). The horizontal line indicates P = 0.05, as calculated with two-sided Mann-Whitney test. c Percentage of mature effector memory CD4⁺CD57⁺ cells out of CD4⁺ T cells in T-LGLL (n = 6) as compared with healthy controls (n = 6) in the flow cytometry cohort. P-values were calculated with two-sided Mann-Whitney test. d Percentage of proliferating CD4⁺ T cells out of CD4⁺ T cells measured with CFSE dilution after stimulation with either TCR ligation or TLR stimulation in patients with T-LGLL compared with healthy controls in the flow cytometry cohort. P-values were calculated with two-sided Mann-Whitney test. e Left: Clonality index (Gini, higher denotes more clonal) in CD8⁺ sorted populations from T-LGLL (n = 10), rheumatoid arthritis (RA) (n = 32), and healthy controls (n = 38) profiled with TCRβ-seq. Middle: Clonality index in non-leukemic TCR-repertoires of mononuclear cell (MNC) samples in patients with T-LGLL (n = 38) and healthy controls (n = 785). Right: Clonality index in non-leukemic TCR-repertoires of MNC samples in STAT3 mutated (mt) (n = 26) and wild-type (wt) (n = 39) patients. P-values were calculated with two-sided Mann-Whitney test.