Temporal and spatial composition of the tumor microenvironment predicts response to immune checkpoint inhibition in metastatic TNBC - PubMed
4 days ago
- #tumor microenvironment
- #immune checkpoint inhibition
- #triple-negative breast cancer
- The study focuses on predicting response to immune checkpoint inhibition (ICI) in metastatic triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) using tumor microenvironment analysis.
- A longitudinal cohort of 103 patients from the TONIC trial was analyzed, including primary tumors, pretreatment metastases, and on-treatment metastases during nivolumab therapy.
- Highly multiplexed imaging profiled 37 proteins in 270 tumors, and the SpaceCat pipeline extracted over 800 imaging features per sample.
- Metastatic tumors, but not primary tumors, contained features predictive of ICI response, with spatial metrics like immune diversity and T cell infiltration at tumor borders being most informative.
- Multivariate models achieved high performance in stratifying patients (AUC = 0.90), and bulk RNA-seq confirmed the predictive value of on-treatment samples.
- The study highlights the importance of longitudinal profiling to understand evolving tumor microenvironment dynamics influencing ICI response.