Vladimir Sukhov

Abstract Gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) is an ubiquitously used tool for evaluating pathway enrichment in transcriptional data. Typical experimental design consists in comparing two conditions with several replicates using a differential gene expression test followed by preranked GSEA performed against a collection of hundreds and thousands of pathways. However, the reference implementation of this method cannot accurately estimate small P-values, which significantly limits its sensitivity due to multiple hypotheses correction procedure. Here we present FGSEA (Fast Gene Set Enrichment Analysis) method that is able to estimate arbitrarily low GSEA P-values with a high accuracy in a matter of minutes or even seconds. To confirm the accuracy of the method, we also developed an exact algorithm for GSEA P-values calculation for integer gene-level statistics. Using the exact algorithm as a reference we show that FGSEA is able to routinely estimate P-values up to 10 −100 with a small and predictable estimation error. We systematically evaluate FGSEA on a collection of 605 datasets and show that FGSEA recovers much more statistically significant pathways compared to other implementations. FGSEA is open source and available as an R package in Bioconductor ( http://bioconductor.org/packages/fgsea/ ) and on GitHub ( https://github.com/ctlab/fgsea/ ).

. Yet, the nature and function of the latter remain unclear. Here, using vaccines containing MHC class I (MHC-I) neoantigens (neoAgs) and different doses of tumour-derived MHC-II neoAgs, we discovered that whereas the inclusion of vaccines with low doses of MHC-II-restricted peptides (LDVax) promoted tumour rejection, vaccines containing high doses of the same MHC-II neoAgs (HDVax) inhibited rejection. Characterization of the inhibitory cells induced by HDVax identified them as type 1 regulatory T (Tr1) cells expressing IL-10, granzyme B, perforin, CCL5 and LILRB4. Tumour-specific Tr1 cells suppressed tumour rejection induced by anti-PD1, LDVax or adoptively transferred tumour-specific effector T cells. Mechanistically, HDVax-induced Tr1 cells selectively killed MHC-II tumour antigen-presenting type 1 conventional dendritic cells (cDC1s), leading to low numbers of cDC1s in tumours. We then documented modalities to overcome this inhibition, specifically via anti-LILRB4 blockade, using a CD8-directed IL-2 mutein, or targeted loss of cDC2/monocytes. Collectively, these data show that cytotoxic Tr1 cells, which maintain peripheral tolerance, also inhibit antitumour responses and thereby function to impede immune control of cancer.