Pre-treatment tumor expression of PD-L1 has been shown to correlate with favorable clinical outcomes following PD-1 blocking therapies. However, the majority of patients with PD-L1+ tumors do not respond to treatment. With the goal of obtaining insights into the mechanisms underlying the response to anti-PD-1 targeted therapies in patients with renal cell carcinoma (RCC) with positive tumor expression of PD-L1, microarray expression data was obtained for pre-treatment tumors from patients with RCC who did or did not have a positive response to anti-PD-1 (nivolumab) therapy. Insight into these mechanisms may lead to improved rationally designed therapies, and biomarkers for selecting patients who are more likely to benefit from these treatments.
Overall design: Gene expression profiling was performed on total RNA extracted from 11 formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) RCC specimens, 4 of which were from patients who had a positive response (objective tumor regression) to the anti-PD-1 (nivolumab) immunotherapy, and 7 of which were from patients who did not have a response. Details of the design, and the gene signatures found are given in the paper associated with this GEO Series: Maria Libera Ascierto, Tracee L. McMiller, Alan E. Berger, Ludmila Danilova, Robert A. Anders, George J. Netto, Haiying Xu, Theresa S. Pritchard, Jinshui Fan, Chris Cheadle, Leslie Cope, Charles G. Drake, Drew M. Pardoll, Janis M. Taube, and Suzanne L. Topalian, The Intratumoral Balance between Metabolic and
Immunologic Gene Expression Is Associated with
Anti–PD-1 Response in Patients with Renal Cell
Carcinoma, published online in Cancer Immunology Research on 4 August 2016, doi: 10.1158/2326-6066.CIR-16-0072
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