PEOPLE (NTC03447678), a phase II trial to test pembrolizumab as first-line treatment in patients with advanced NSCLC with PD-L1 <50%: a multiomics analysis

BACKGROUND: Chemoimmunotherapy represents the standard of care for patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and programmed death-ligand 1 (PD-L1) <50%. Although single-agent pembrolizumab has also demonstrated some activity in this setting, no reliable biomarkers yet exist for selecting patients likely to respond to single-agent immunotherapy. The main purpose of the study was to identify potential new biomarkers associated with progression-free-survival (PFS) within a multiomics analysis. METHODS: PEOPLE (NTC03447678) was a prospective phase II trial evaluating first-line pembrolizumab in patients with advanced EGFR and ALK wild type treatment-naïve NSCLC with PD-L1 <50%. Circulating immune profiling was performed by determination of absolute cell counts with multiparametric flow cytometry on freshly isolated whole blood samples at baseline and at first radiological evaluation. Gene expression profiling was performed using nCounter PanCancer IO 360 Panel (NanoString) on baseline tissue. Gut bacterial taxonomic abundance was obtained by shotgun metagenomic sequencing of stool samples at baseline. Omics data were analyzed with sequential univariate Cox proportional hazards regression predicting PFS, with Benjamini-Hochberg multiple comparisons correction. Biological features significant with univariate analysis were analyzed with multivariate least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO). RESULTS: From May 2018 to October 2020, 65 patients were enrolled. Median follow-up and PFS were 26.4 and 2.9 months, respectively. LASSO integration analysis, with an optimal lambda of 0.28, showed that peripheral blood natural killer cells/CD56dimCD16+ (HR 0.56, 0.41–0.76, p=0.006) abundance at baseline and non-classical CD14dimCD16+monocytes (HR 0.52, 0.36–0.75, p=0.004), eosinophils (CD15+CD16−) (HR 0.62, 0.44–0.89, p=0.03) and lymphocytes (HR 0.32, 0.19–0.56, p=0.001) after first radiologic evaluation correlated with favorable PFS as well as high baseline expression levels of CD244 (HR 0.74, 0.62–0.87, p=0.05) protein tyrosine phosphatase receptor type C (HR 0.55, 0.38–0.81, p=0.098) and killer cell lectin like receptor B1 (HR 0.76, 0.66–0.89, p=0.05). Interferon-responsive factor 9 and cartilage oligomeric matrix protein genes correlated with unfavorable PFS (HR 3.03, 1.52–6.02, p 0.08 and HR 1.22, 1.08–1.37, p=0.06, corrected). No microbiome features were selected. CONCLUSIONS: This multiomics approach was able to identify immune cell subsets and expression levels of genes associated to PFS in patients with PD-L1 <50% NSCLC treated with first-line pembrolizumab. These preliminary data will be confirmed in the larger multicentric international I3LUNG trial (NCT05537922). TRIAL REGISTRATION NUMBER: 2017-002841-31.