Abstract 3323: nELISA high-throughput protein profiling applied to the RADIOHEAD cohort: Insights from the largest plasma proteomics study of patients receiving checkpoint inhibitor therapy
Authors: Nathaniel Robichaud, Samantha I. Liang, Grant Ongo, Enjun Yang, Kiran Edwardson, JiaMin Huang, Andy Lee, John E. Connolly, Milad Dagher
Journal: Cancer Research (2025)

Abstract Proteomics holds great promise for cancer immunotherapy, with intensive efforts being exerted for early disease identification, patients selection, and adverse event prediction. Despite this potential, the high cost and low throughput of existing tools to profile circulating proteins render such studies prohibitively slow and costly, limiting their wide-spread application. As a result, proteomics studies in the field have been constrained to sample sizes in the 10s and 100s , restricting the power to discover key biomarkers. Here, we leverage a novel proteomics tool, the nELISA, to quantify ∼600 circulating proteins across ∼3000 samples from the RADIOHEAD (Resistance Drivers for Immuno-Oncology Patients Interrogated by Harmonized Molecular Datasets) cohort, a prospective study of 1070 immunotherapy naive pan-tumor patients on standard of care immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) therapy regimens from community oncology clinics. The nELISA is a highly multiplexed immunoassay platform that enables the profiling of hundreds of proteins across 1536 samples per instrument daily, at significantly reduced costs. The method miniaturizes sandwich immunoassays by pre-packaging antibody pairs on the surface of color-coded microparticles, which can then be analyzed via high-throughput flow cytometry. Using this technology, our preliminary data identified several markers of response to treatment; for example, PD-1 inhibitors resulted in increased circulating levels of soluble PD-1, and ICIs increased levels of several chemokines including CXCL9 and CXCL10, as seen in several other small-scale studies. We also identified potentially novel markers associated with response to treatment and irAEs, requiring a much larger dataset for validation. The scalable nature of the nELISA platform now allows us to validate these findings in a large longitudinal cohort, providing the power needed for such a broad biomarker discovery effort. In this presentation, we share the results of applying nELISA to the RADIOHEAD serum samples from pretreatment, early on-treatment, 6-month, and 12-month timepoints. For participants who experienced immune-related adverse events, additional samples were collected upon presentation and in follow-up visits - these samples were also analyzed in this study. Pairing nELISA protein profiling of these longitudinal samples with associated demographic metadata and clinical outcomes provides an opportunity to identify clinically actionable mechanisms for ICI resistance and adverse events, discover targets for combination therapies and post-ICI treatment, and inform system biology approaches to elucidate disease pathways. Such identified biomarkers and protein signatures are expected to further accelerate research and improve clinical decision making in the field of cancer immunotherapy. Citation Format: Nathaniel Robichaud,Samantha I. Liang,Grant Ongo,Enjun Yang,Kiran Edwardson,JiaMin Huang,Andy Lee,John E. Connolly,Milad Dagher. nELISA high-throughput protein profiling applied to the RADIOHEAD cohort: Insights from the largest plasma proteomics study of patients receiving checkpoint inhibitor therapy [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2025; Part 1 (Regular Abstracts); 2025 Apr 25-30; Chicago, IL. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2025;85(8_Suppl_1):Abstract nr 3323.