Generating immunogenomic data-guided virtual patients using a QSP model to predict response of advanced NSCLC to PD-L1 inhibition

Generating realistic virtual patients from a limited amount of patient data is one of the major challenges for quantitative systems pharmacology modeling in immuno-oncology. Quantitative systems pharmacology (QSP) is a mathematical modeling methodology that integrates mechanistic knowledge of biological systems to investigate dynamics in a whole system during disease progression and drug treatment. In the present analysis, we parameterized our previously published QSP model of the cancer-immunity cycle to non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and generated a virtual patient cohort to predict clinical response to PD-L1 inhibition in NSCLC. The virtual patient generation was guided by immunogenomic data from iAtlas portal and population pharmacokinetic data of durvalumab, a PD-L1 inhibitor. With virtual patients generated following the immunogenomic data distribution, our model predicted a response rate of 18.6% (95% bootstrap confidence interval: 13.3–24.2%) and identified CD8/Treg ratio as a potential predictive biomarker in addition to PD-L1 expression and tumor mutational burden. We demonstrated that omics data served as a reliable resource for virtual patient generation techniques in immuno-oncology using QSP models.