Development and validation of an ADT resistance signature to predict adjuvant hormone treatment failure.

Abstract

106 Background: Androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) is one of the main treatment options for locally advanced and metastatic prostate cancer. Neuroendocrine prostate cancer (NEPC) is inherently less sensitive or even resistant to ADT. NEPC can be observed de novo (e.g., small cell prostate cancer) but more commonly arises after exposure to ADT. We hypothesized that a gene expression signature of NEPC when measured in primary tumor specimens (RP) of prostatic adenocarcinoma may be useful for predicting patients with innate resistance to ADT. Methods: Expression profiles of 1023 PCa patients treated with RP were obtained from the Decipher GRID database. These were split into training (n=529) and validation (n=494) sets and stratified by the receipt of adjuvant ADT (n=243) or no adjuvant ADT (n=780). A literature review of ADT resistance and neuroendocrine genes identified 1,557 genes as candidates. This set was further filtered, using logistic regression to select a 52-gene ADT resistance signature (ARS). ARS was trained using a generalized linear model with lasso regularization. Survival c-index and Kaplan Meier was used to compare survival differences between treated and untreated patients with high and low ARS scores (defined by median split). Results: In validation cohorts, the ARS was predictive of metastasis in cohorts receiving adjuvant ADT (10-year metastasis free survival c-index of 0.69 (95% CI 0.59-0.78) as compared to 0.45 (95% CI 0.29-0.61) in patients not treated with ADT). Similarly in a separate cohort of untreated patients that received no ADT until after metastatic onset, ARS was not prognostic (c-index 0.53). Among ADT treated patients, those with low ARS scores had a 10 year MFS of 87%, versus 70% in those with high ARS scores (p<0.001). In the subset of men who received ADT after metastatic onset and who developed castrate-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC, n = 41), median time to treatment failure was 1 year in patients with high ARS compared to 2 years for those with low ARS scores (p=0.07). Conclusions: A 52-gene ADT resistance signature was developed which showed significant differences in metastasis-free survival among adjuvant hormone treated but not untreated patients.