Heterogeneity of neoantigen landscape between primary lesions and their matched metastases in lung cancer

BACKGROUND: Personalized cancer vaccines based on tumor-derived neoantigens have shown strong and long-lasting antitumor effect in patients with some solid tumors. However, whether neoantigens identified from primary lesions could represent their metastatic lesions, and consequently the effect of vaccine therapy remained unknown. METHODS: To investigate whether neoantigens identified from primary tumors are similar to their matched metastases in lung cancer, we identified 79 samples from 24 cases. All of samples were collected before any systemic therapy. Major criteria for neoantigen identification included: derived from tumor-specific mutations, fold change >10 comparing to germline expression level, high predicted human leukocyte antigen (HLA) binding affinity and peptide of 9–11 amino acids in length. RESULTS: We found a wide range of tumor neoantigen burden in both primaries and metastases. The counts, overall distribution pattern and predicted HLA binding affinity of neoantigens were similar between primaries and metastases. However, only 20% of shared neoantigens (presented in both primaries and metastases) was observed, which were mainly derived from single nucleotide variants (SNVs) and fusions. A variety of corresponding HLA alleles were observed and 50.0% of cases were HLA-C*06:02. Finally, we observed the neoantigen intrametastases homogeneity in patients with sole brain metastases. CONCLUSIONS: Neoantigen landscape in terms of the number, type and predicted HLA binding affinity was similar between primaries and metastases, but the percentage of shared neoantigens is only modest, suggesting vaccine development based solely on primary tumor neoantigen may not offer optimal therapeutic outcome, and shared neoantigen needs to be seriously considered.