Abstract 2295: Circulating T cell receptor repertoire analysis improves cancer early detection
Authors: Li Yilong , Nahas Michelle , Stephens Dennis , Froburg Kate , Hintz Emma , Champagne Devin , Lochab Amaneet , Brown Markus , Abhyankar Jesse , Braun Jasper , Dinh Michelle , Fortuño María Antonia , Ocon María-del-Mar , Pasquier Andrea , Luque Inés María , Seder Christopher W. , Borgia Jeffrey A. , Seijo Luis Miguel , Montuenga Luis M. , Yelensky Roman 
Published: March 2024

Background: Cancer screening by liquid biopsy promises to detect cancer early when it can be cured. However, current liquid biopsy approaches based on circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) detect only a minority of early-stage cancers, because these tumors shed little ctDNA and plasma sample volume is limited. For liquid biopsy to realize its potential for the early detection of cancer, sensitivity for the earliest stage disease must be improved.

Methods: We set out to improve sensitivity of liquid biopsy for cancer early detection by exploiting tumor recognition by T cells through sequencing of the circulating T cell receptor repertoire. Using gDNA extracted from blood buffy coats, we studied a cohort of 451 lung cancer patients (86% with stage I disease) and 525 subjects without cancer, enriched for older individuals with a history of smoking. We performed genomic DNA TCR beta chain sequencing to yield a median of 81,088 TCR clonotypes in cancer patients and 112,588 clonotypes in non-cancer controls. We built a TCR sequence similarity nearest neighbor graph to cluster &gt;68M distinct TCR clonotypes into TCR repertoire functional units (RFUs). The TCR frequencies of RFUs were tested for association with cancer status and significantly associated RFUs were combined using a support vector machine model into a TCR RFU cancer score. This model was evaluated by 10-fold cross-validation (CV) and compared to a ctDNA panel of 237 mutation hotspots in 154 lung cancer driver genes (IDT™) and to a panel of 17 lung cancer related protein biomarkers (Olink®) in 87 subjects.

Results: We identified 177 cancer-associated TCR RFUs at FDR≤0.10, including 83 RFUs that were enriched in cancer samples with a TCR count log2-fold change between 0.05 and 1.31, and 94 that were enriched in controls with a log2-fold change between 0.07 and 0.40. We observed 56 of the 83 cancer-enriched RFUs had decreasing TCR counts with increasing age across the cohort, coupled with higher counts in cancer patients relative to age-matched controls. The TCR RFU cancer score achieved a cross-validated ROC AUC of 0.69 for cancer status prediction, with the AUC for stage I cancers similar to that of stage II-IV (0.69 vs. 0.70). 44% of stage I cancers (test samples of each CV fold) were detected by the TCR model at a specificity of 80%. We saw a substantial gain in sensitivity for stage I cancer when TCR RFUs were added to ctDNA and proteins, with a ~15-20%-point increase seen at the 90% target specificity level typical for cancer screening tests. Likewise, sensitivity increased at the 99% specificity level used in multi-cancer early detection, with 35% of stage I lung cancers detected, which could not be achieved by any analyte alone.

Conclusion: We demonstrate detection of a significant fraction of early lung cancer cases from blood by analyzing the circulating TCR repertoire and show that this signal is complementary to established analytes such as proteins and ctDNA.

Citation Format: Yilong Li, Michelle Nahas, Dennis Stephens, Kate Froburg, Emma Hintz, Devin Champagne, Amaneet Lochab, Markus Brown, Jesse Abhyankar, Jasper Braun, Michelle Dinh, María Antonia Fortuño, María-del-Mar Ocon, Andrea Pasquier, Inés María Luque, Christopher W. Seder, Jeffrey A. Borgia, Luis Miguel Seijo, Luis M. Montuenga, Roman Yelensky. Circulating T cell receptor repertoire analysis improves cancer early detection [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2024; Part 1 (Regular Abstracts); 2024 Apr 5-10; San Diego, CA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2024;84(6_Suppl):Abstract nr 2295.