Fragment of the opening of the Academic Surgical Congress
At the US Annual Academic Surgical Congress on 1-3 February 2022, members of the academic community of the Faculty of Medicine – students Agnė Grigonytė and Rokas Stulpinas, Prof. Arvydas Laurinavičius, Prof. Kęstutis Strupas and Dr. Aistė Kielaitė-Gulla – made a presentation on Association of CD8+ Lymphocyte Infiltration and Clinicopathological Parameters in Hepatocellular Carcinoma.
“Thanks to the cooperation between VU MF Centre for Visceral Medicine and Translational Research and the National Centre of Pathology, the research conducted during the summer internships, became a summary of research, which we submitted to the Academic Surgical Congress and then were invited to present the findings at the congress in Orlando, Florida,” Agnė Grigonytė said.
During their summer internship at the National Centre of Pathology, the Centre for Abdominal Surgery and Centre for Oncosurgery, students, together with their supervisors, conducted research into the immune response in the case of hepatocellular carcinoma. The examination of the immune response was based on the calculation of CD8+ lymphocytes in immunohistochemical liver preparations and the analysis of the findings obtained, together with the clinicopathological parameters gathered.
According to Grigonytė, the research sought to compare the number of CD8+ cells in the HCV-associated and the non-viral hepatocellular carcinoma, and also to explore possible connections with surgical, laboratory and pathological findings.
The research identified correlations between the number of CD8+ cells in the centre of the tumour and in the boundary between the tumour and healthy tissue. This, and its connection with the increased preoperative laboratory values and the type of liver resection, were of interest to the participants at the congress and ignited further discussions.
Despite this being the only presentation from Lithuania at the US Academic Surgical Congress, it received a lot of attention, and the organisers asked the researchers to share the findings of their research in the journal Surgery.