Immunotherapies targeting the PD-1/PD-L1 interaction have proven remarkably effective for treating cancer in some patients. There has now been considerable focus into the sensitivity and specificity measures of the technologies used to predict clinical response and aid in better patient selection. Recently, researchers at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine published a comprehensive comparison in JAMA Oncology to determine the relative accuracy of these biomarker assays including PD-L1 immunohistochemistry (IHC), multiplexed immunofluoresence (mIF) and genomic approaches including tumor mutational burden (TMB) and gene expression profiling (GEP). Steve Lu, of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine will present the study results demonstrating the improved predictive value of multiplexed IHC/IF methods compared to other modalities. The review compared results of over 8000 patients from over 45 published studies detailing the treatment selection across multiple types of lung, bladder, skin, and gastric amongst other cancers. Statistical analysis of the different methods suggest multiplexed IHC/IF biomarker strategies are associated with improved predictive performance over PD-L1 IHC, TMB or GEP approaches alone.

 

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