Title

Is the blood an alternative for programmed cell death ligand 1 assessment in non-small cell lung cancer?

Authors

Emmanuel Acheampong, Edith Cowan UniversityFollow
Isaac Spencer, Edith Cowan UniversityFollow
Weitao Lin, Edith Cowan UniversityFollow
Melanie Ziman, Edith Cowan UniversityFollow
Michael Millward
Elin Gray, Edith Cowan UniversityFollow

Document Type

Journal Article

Publication Title

Cancers

Publisher

MDPI

School

School of Medical and Health Sciences

RAS ID

29153

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

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.

DOI

10.3390/cancers11070920

Related Publications

Acheampong, E. (2022). Assessment of circulating tumour cells in lung cancer patients. https://ro.ecu.edu.au/theses/2554

Spencer, I. (2020). Characterising PD-L1 expression in circulating melanoma and non-small cell lung cancer cells. https://ro.ecu.edu.au/theses/2318

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.