Abstract
Anti-programmed cell death (PD)-1/PD-ligand 1 (L1) therapies have significantly improved the outcomes for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients in recent years. These therapies work by reactivating the immune system and enabling it to target cancer cells once more. There is a general agreement that expression of PD-L1 on tumour cells predicts the therapeutic response to PD-1/PD-L1 inhibitors in NSCLC. Hence, immunohistochemical staining of tumour tissue biopsies from NSCLC patients with PD-L1 antibodies is the current standard used to aid selection of patients for treatment with anti-PD-1 as first line therapy. However, issues of small tissue samples, tissue heterogeneity, the emergence of new metastatic sites, and dynamic changes in the expression of PD-L1 may influence PD-L1 status during disease evolution. Re-biopsy would expose patients to the risk of complications and tardy results. Analysis of PD-L1 expression on circulating tumour cells (CTCs) may provide an accessible and non-invasive means to select patients for anti-PD-1 therapies. Additionally, CTCs could potentially provide a useful biomarker in their own right. Several published studies have assessed PD-L1 expression on CTCs from NSCLC patients. Overall, analysis of PD-L1 on CTCs is feasible and could be detected prior to and after frontline therapy. However, there is no evidence on whether PD-L1 expression on CTCs could predict the response to anti-PD-1/PD-L1 treatment. This review examines the challenges that need to be addressed to demonstrate the clinical validity of PD-L1 analysis in CTCs as a biomarker capable of predicting the response to immune checkpoint blockade.
RAS ID
29153
Document Type
Journal Article
Date of Publication
2019
School
School of Medical and Health Sciences
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Publisher
MDPI
Recommended Citation
Acheampong, E., Spencer, I., Lin, W., Ziman, M., Millward, M., & Gray, E. (2019). Is the blood an alternative for programmed cell death ligand 1 assessment in non-small cell lung cancer?. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/cancers11070920
Comments
Acheampong, E., Spencer, I., Lin, W., Ziman, M., Millward, M., & Gray, E. (2019). Is the blood an alternative for programmed cell death ligand 1 assessment in non-small cell lung cancer?. Cancers, 11(7), Article 920. Available here