Immunotherapy Research: PD-L1 Expression in Tissues of Lung Cancer Patients

Phase Clinical and the FDA recently completed a study to help improve immunotherapy for certain lung cancer patients.

We presented these findings at the SITC Annual Meeting, which began on November 9, 2020 (entry 236).

The study looked at PD-L1 expression patterns in associated lymph node metastases where information is particularly limited.

View our abstract and summary poster here (download pdf here).

Immunotherapies against programmed death ligand-1 (PD-L1) have been established as an effective treatment for a subset of lung cancer patients. Even though it is critical for a successful therapy to know prevalent PD-L1 expression patterns in all affected tissues, information on matching lymph node metastases and immune cells is particularly limited. The purpose of this study was thus to evaluate comparative PD-L1 expression profiles in those tissues.

Our results showed that squamous cell carcinomas and adenocarcinomas display significant heterogeneity with regard to PD-L1 expression in associated lymph node metastases. While the reasons for this frequent discordant PD-L1 expression pattern involving both tumor and immune cells need to be investigated further, our findings may help guide the proper interpretation of PD-L1 companion diagnostic test results and subsequent therapeutic decisions.

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