Correlation between immunotherapy biomarker PD-L1 expression and genetic alteration in patients with non-small cell lung cancer

Abstract

Programmed death-ligand 1 (PD-L1) has been widely used in immunotherapy evaluation of patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). However, the effect is not particularly ideal, and the association between PD-L1 and genetic alterations requires more exploration. Here, we performed targeted next-generation sequencing and PD-L1 immunohistochemistry (IHC) testing for PD-L1 expression on both tumor cells (TCs) and tumor-infiltrating immune cells (ICs) in 1549 patients. Our studies showed that surgical method of resection was positively correlated with IC+, and a low tumor mutation burden (TMB) was negatively correlated with TC+. Furthermore, we found that EGFR was mutually exclusive with both ALK and STK11. In addition, the features between PD-L1 expression status and genomic alterations were characterized. These results suggest that clinical characteristics and molecular phenotypes are associated with PD-L1 expression signatures, which may provide novel insights for improving the efficiency of immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) in immunotherapy.