An integrative pan cancer analysis of RET aberrations and their potential clinical implications

RET (rearranged during transfection), encoding a tyrosine kinase receptor, is a novel therapeutic target for cancers. The aberrations of RET are commonly found in cancers. Here, we profiled a comprehensive genomic landscape of RET mutations, copy number variants (CNVs), co-occurrence of RET and its mRNA expression and methylation levels in pan cancer, paving the way to the development of new RET-targeted therapies in clinic. Analysis of RET somatic mutations, CNVs, co-occurrence, mRNA expression and methylation were performed among 32 cancer types from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) dataset covering a total of 10,953 patients with 10,967 samples. RET aberrations were found in 3.0% of diverse cancers. The top two RET-altered tumors were skin cutaneous melanoma (SKCM) and uterine corpus endometrial carcinoma (UCEC) with dominant mutations in the other and PKinase_Tyr domains. RET-G823E and RET-S891L were most commonly found in SKCM and UCEC. Thyroid carcinoma (THCA) demonstrated the highest rate of coiled-coil domain containing 6 (CCDC6)-RET fusions, which constitutively activate RET kinase. Two FDA-approved RET inhibitors—pralsetinib and selpercatinib have been implied for the treatment of patients with RET S891L mutant UCEC and the treatment of patients with metastatic RET-fusion positive THCA and non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) at therapeutic level 1. We also identified four RET M918T-altered cases in patients with pheochromocytoma and paraganglioma (PCPG), which may induce drug resistance against multikinase inhibitors. Next, 273 co-occurring aberrations, most frequently in Notch signaling, TGF-β pathway, cell cycle, and Ras-Raf-MEK-Erk/JNK signaling, were uncovered among 311 RET altered cases. TP53 mutations (162 patients) leads to the most significant co-occurrence associated with RET aberrations. Furthermore, the RET expression was found most significantly increased in breast invasive carcinoma (BRCA) and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSC), as compared to their corresponding normal tissues. At last, patients with higher expression and sequence variant frequency have a worse prognosis, such as sarcoma patients. This work provided a profound and comprehensive analysis of RET and co-occurred alterations, RET mRNA expression and the clinical significance in pan cancer, offering new insights into targeted therapy for patients with RET anomalies.