Abstract 957: Prediction of patient response to targeted and immunotherapies from the tumor transcriptome in a wide set of indications and clinical trials
Authors: Dinstag Gal , Shulman Eldad D. , Elis Efrat , Ben-Zvi Doreen S. , Tirosh Omer , Maimon Eden , Meilijson Isaac , Elalouf Emmanuel , Temkin Boris , Vitkovsky Philipp , Schiff Eyal , Hoang Danh-Tai , Sinha Sanju , Nair Nishanth Ulhas , Sang-Lee Joo , Schäffer Alejandro A. , Ronai Ze'ev , Juric Dejan , Apolo Andrea B. , Dahut William L. , Lipkowitz Stanley , Berger Raanan , Kurzrock Razelle , Papanicolau-Sengos Antonios , Karzai Fatima , Gilbert Mark R. , Aldape Kenneth , Rajagopal Padma S. , Beker Tuvik , Ruppin Eytan , Aharonov Ranit 
Published: April 2023

Background: Precision oncology is gradually advancing into mainstream clinical practice, demonstrating significant survival benefits. However, eligibility and response rates remain limited in many cases, calling for better predictive biomarkers.

Methods: We present ENLIGHT, a transcriptomics-based computational approach that identifies clinically relevant genetic interactions and uses them to predict a patient’s response to a variety of therapies in multiple cancer types, importantly, without training on previous treatment response data. Consequently, in addition to its ability to predict patients' response to approved and well-studied therapies, ENLIGHT can predict the response to new treatments in early development, even before clinical data has accumulated. Accordingly, we study ENLIGHT in two translationally relevant scenarios: Personalized Oncology (PO), aimed at prioritizing approved treatments to a given patient, and Clinical Trial Design (CTD), selecting the subset of most likely responders in a patient cohort.

Results: Evaluating ENLIGHT’s performance on 21 blinded clinical trial datasets spanning 11 indications and 15 different drugs in the PO setting, we show that it can effectively predict a patient’s treatment response across multiple therapies and cancer types, with an overall odds ratio of 2.59 (p=3.41e-8), and a 36% increase in response rate over the baseline (p=3.30e-13). Its prediction accuracy is better than other state-of-the-art transcriptomics-based signatures. Unlike most signatures that are prognostic or provide insights for only very few, specific treatments, ENLIGHT provides matching scores to a broad range of treatments. Quite strikingly, its performance is comparable to that of supervised predictors developed for specific indications and drugs. In combination with the IFN-γ signature, ENLIGHT achieves an odds ratio larger than 4 in predicting response to immune checkpoint therapy. In the CTD scenario, our results show that by excluding non-responders ENLIGHT can enhance clinical trial success for immunotherapies and other monoclonal antibodies, achieving &gt; 90% of the response rate attainable under an optimal exclusion strategy.

Conclusion: ENLIGHT is a powerful transcriptomics-based precision oncology pipeline developed by Pangea Biomed that broadly predicts response to both extant and novel targeted and immune therapies, going beyond context-specific biomarkers.

Citation Format: Gal Dinstag, Eldad D. Shulman, Efrat Elis, Doreen S. Ben-Zvi, Omer Tirosh, Eden Maimon, Isaac Meilijson, Emmanuel Elalouf, Boris Temkin, Philipp Vitkovsky, Eyal Schiff, Danh-Tai Hoang, Sanju Sinha, Nishanth Ulhas Nair, Joo Sang-Lee, Alejandro A. Schäffer, Ze'ev Ronai, Dejan Juric, Andrea B. Apolo, William L. Dahut, Stanley Lipkowitz, Raanan Berger, Razelle Kurzrock, Antonios Papanicolau-Sengos, Fatima Karzai, Mark R. Gilbert, Kenneth Aldape, Padma S. Rajagopal, Tuvik Beker, Eytan Ruppin, Ranit Aharonov. Prediction of patient response to targeted and immunotherapies from the tumor transcriptome in a wide set of indications and clinical trials [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2023; Part 1 (Regular and Invited Abstracts); 2023 Apr 14-19; Orlando, FL. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2023;83(7_Suppl):Abstract nr 957.