Low intratumor heterogeneity correlates with increased response to PD-1 blockade in renal cell carcinoma

Intratumor heterogeneity (ITH) has been shown to be inversely associated with immune infiltration in several cancers including clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC), but it remains unclear whether ITH is associated with response to immunotherapy (e.g. PD-1 blockade) in ccRCC.

We quantified ITH using mutant-allele tumor heterogeneity, investigated the association of ITH with immune parameters in patients with ccRCC (n = 336) as well as those with papillary RCC (pRCC, n = 280) from The Cancer Genome Atlas, and validations were conducted in patients with ccRCC from an independent cohort (n = 152). The relationship between ITH and response to anti-PD-1 immunotherapy was explored in patients with metastatic ccRCC from a clinical trial of anti-PD-1 therapy (n = 35), and validated in three equal-size simulated data sets (n = 60) generated by random sampling with replacement based on this clinical trial cohort.

In ccRCC, low ITH was associated with better survival, more reductions in tumor burden, and clinical benefit of anti-PD-1 immunotherapy through modulating immune activity involving more neoantigens, elevated expression of HLA class I genes, and higher abundance of dendritic cells. Furthermore, we found that the association between the level of ITH and response to PD-1 blockade was independent of the mutation status of PBRM1 and that integrating both factors performed better than the individual predictors in predicting the benefit of anti-PD-1 immunotherapy in ccRCC patients. In pRCC, increased immune activity was also observed in low- versus high-ITH tumors, including higher neoantigen counts, increased abundance of monocytes, and decreased expression of PD-L1 and PD-L2.

ITH may be helpful in the identification of patients who could benefit from PD-1 blockade in ccRCC, and even in pRCC where no genomic metrics has been found to correlate with response to immune checkpoint inhibitors.