Seeing the forest and the tree: TILs and PD-L1 as immune biomarkers

Here we will provide an immune-focussed overview of biomarkers in early and advanced stage breast cancer. It should be noted from the outset that all the biomarkers under discussion here have not been tested in prospective clinical trials to determine their predictive performance. Such trials require very large sample sizes due to the statistical burden of testing an interaction between a treatment and a biomarker, which is compounded by the heterogeneous biology of breast cancer (Polley et al. in J Natl Cancer Inst 105:1677-1683 2013 [1]). For a detailed discussion of the immunobiology of breast cancer, analytical aspects of these biomarkers, emerging biomarkers such as tumour mutation burden and detailed immunotherapy clinical trial data, see other articles in this issue.