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Updated: Jun 21, 2026
Predictive Immune Modeling of Solid Tumors
Published on: February 25, 2020
Predicting immune-related thyroiditis using polygenic risk scores in patients with advanced melanoma
Ahmad A Tarhini1,2, Mohammad Ali Khaksar2, Zhihua Chen3
1Department of Immunology, H Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Center, Tampa, Florida, USA ahmad.tarhini@moffitt.org.
Background:
Inherited genetic variation may impact patient response and risk of toxicity following immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) therapy.
Methods:
We conducted an agnostic genome-wide analysis study for inherited genetic variants that may predict thyroiditis in patients with melanoma treated with ipilimumab and investigated Polygenic Risk Scores (PRSs) previously reported to be associated with thyroid disease. Germline DNA from 744 participants in a phase 3 adjuvant trial was analyzed following genome-wide genotyping.
Results:
An agnostic genome-wide cohort-level analysis identified top associated single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), and a custom 10-SNP PRS was significantly associated with thyroiditis risk and severity. Among the SNPs identified, five mapped to intronic, four intergenic and one exonic regions. The latter was the lead SNP and mapped to CNOT6L, located near CXCL13. Among the other variants, most were located within regions with potential relevance to immune regulation and autoimmunity. Separately, multiple thyroid disease-related PRSs derived from Polygenic Score Catalog weights were tested, and several were significantly associated with thyroiditis, but the custom PRS had stronger discrimination for thyroiditis risk (area under the curve 0.82).
Conclusions:
These findings indicate that inherited genetic background contributes to thyroid immune toxicity risk following ICI and support PRS-based approaches for risk-adapted monitoring during immunotherapy.
