JCO PO Article Insights: ctDNA as a Prognostic Biomarker in EGC

In this JCO Precision Oncology Article Insights episode, Natalie DelRocco summarizes "Digital Pathology–Based Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Scores and Outcomes in a Randomized Phase III Trial in Men With Nonmetastatic Castration-Resistant Prostate Cancer" by Felix Y. Feng, et al published January 31, 2025. Come back for the next episode where JCO Precision Oncology Conversations host, Dr. Rafeh Naqash interviews the author of the JCO PO article discussed, Dr. Tim Showalter. TRANSCRIPT Natalie DelRocco: Hello and welcome to JCO Precision Oncology Article Insights. I'm your host Natalie Del Rocco. Today, we'll be discussing the article, “Digital Pathology-Based Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Scores and Outcomes in a Randomized Phase III Trial in Men With Nonmetastatic Castration-Resistant Prostate Cancer.” We will also be discussing the accompanying editorial, “Leveraging Artificial Intelligence to Improve Risk Stratification in Nonmetastatic Castration-Resistant Prostate Cancer.” So, we're going to start by summarizing the original report and then we'll jump into a few of the high-level interpretations that were supplied by the editorial.   The original report by Feng et. al. describes the application of multimodal artificial intelligence to data collected on a nonmetastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer. We will call this disease moving forward NMCRPC, a Clinical Trial. So, we're looking at data from an NMCRPC clinical trial. The SPARTAN trial was a randomized phase three trial and this study compared metastasis-free survival as the primary endpoint for those treated with traditional androgen deprivation therapy or ADT to those treated with androgen deprivation therapy plus apalutamide. Other secondary endpoints included progression-free survival and overall survival, but the primary endpoint there was metastasis-free survival or MFS. This study found that the addition of apalutamide resulted in a significantly longer median metastasis-free survival compared to androgen deprivation therapy alone. And we should note that this is a double-blind placebo-controlled trial. In the overall study, 1,207 patients participated and over the course of this study histopathology slides were collected and they were digitized for future use. And that future use is what we are going to be discussing today.  The authors do note that there are currently no good biomarkers for use in NMCRPC. The authors seem to be inspired by the ArteraAI prostate test, which was a recent application of multimodal artificial intelligence models. But in localized prostate cancer as opposed to NMCRPC, the authors constructed a multimodal artificial intelligence model or an MMAI model. They applied this to the SPARTAN trial with the intention of developing a risk score that could be used for risk stratification in NMCRPC. And we should note here that multimodal artificial intelligence or MMAI is a broad class of artificial intelligence models, and they can analyze different types of data at one time, hence the term multimodal. So in this example, the author's primary data source of interest were those digitized histopathology images because histopathology tells you a lot about NMCRPC. The authors though also wanted their model to consider traditional clinical factors that are known to be prognostic such as Gleason score, tumor stage, PSA level, and age. So those two different types of data, those histopathology images and that traditional clinical data are the two different types of data that make this model multimodal. So we should note here importantly, after dropping missing data, 420 patients contribute to this model, the MMAI model.  The authors generate a risk score from this MMAI model and they categorize that risk score into low, intermediate, and high risk groups using clinical knowledge. The authors found in their results that an increase in this MMAI risk score was associated with an increased hazard of metastasis-free survival event with a hazard ratio from a Cox proportional hazards model of 1.72. To summarize how the authors arrived here, they derived a risk score from this MMAI model which incorporates both imaging and regular data. They plugged this risk score into a Cox proportional hazards mode,l modeling metastasis-free survival and they found that an increase in that MMAI based risk score is associated with increased hazard of metastasis-free event with a hazard ratio of 1.72, which is quite large. Additionally, the risk score seemed to be associated with PFS2 and OS, which were two of the secondary endpoints from the SPARTAN clinical trial, though the effect sizes were more modest. Those are the highlights from the original report, the methods and the results.  The accompanying editorial notes that both histopathology and Gleason score specifically are very critical to understanding prostate cancer, and Gleason score alone is not sufficient to summarize the complexity of the disease, although it is a well validated prognostic factor for prostate cancer. So this makes MMAI an excellent tool in the setting described by the authors. We have an existing prognostic factor that doesn't describe the entire picture of the disease by itself and so we can use those digitized histopathology slides to help bolster our understanding and provide the model more information. MMAI allows you to do this because it can take in different types of data. So that was the main conclusion of the editorial.  They also summarize a number of recent validations of MMAI models in prostate cancer research, noting that it will be an important tool for risk stratification and has already been shown to outperform classical techniques. The editorial though does highlight a number of weaknesses of this paper, limitations and I think the most important one to highlight, and we touched on this earlier, is that 420 patients from the SPARTAN clinical trial contributed to the development of this MMAI score. That is a small proportion of the roughly 1200 patients that did participate in the SPARTAN clinical trial. So we have a small subgroup analysis that can be limiting and this model will need to be validated in a broader population in the future.   Thank you for listening to JCO Precision Oncology Article Insights. Don't forget to give us a rating or a review and be sure to subscribe so that you never miss an episode. You can find all ASCO shows at asco.org/podcasts.    The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions.   Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience and conclusions. Guest statements on the podcast do not express the opinions of ASCO. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement.      

In this JCO Precision Oncology Article Insights episode, Jiasen He summarizes “Midline Low-Grade Gliomas of Early Childhood: Focus on Targeted Therapies.” by Dr. Ludmila Papusha et al. published on July 08, 2024. TRANSCRIPT  Jiasen He: Hello and welcome to JCO Precision Oncology Article Insights. I'm your host Jiasen He, a JCO Journal's Editorial Fellow. Today, I will provide a summary on “Midline Low-Grade Gliomas of Early Childhood: Focus on Targeted Therapies.” This is an observational study by Dr. Ludmila Papusha and colleagues that investigated the use of target therapies in early childhood with midline low grade glioma. Low grade glioma located in the hypothalamic chiasmatic region, thalamus and the brain stem are classified as midline low grade gliomas. Due to their unique locations, complete surgical resection is usually not able to be achieved. In young children with low grade glioma, radiation therapy is generally not favored. Traditionally, chemotherapy regimens such as carboplatin and vincristine have been used. However, as Dr. Papusha noted, this population often exhibits poor response to chemotherapy. With a growing understanding of the RAS-RAF-MEK pathways in low grade glioma, targeted therapy has emerged as a promising treatment option for this group. However, limited data is available regarding the mutation status of midline low grade glioma in early childhood and real world evidence on their response to targeted therapy remains scarce. Dr. Papusha's research aimed to address this critical gap by evaluating the effectiveness of targeted therapy in midline gliomas of early childhood. In this observational study, 40 patients under the age of three with midline low grade glioma were enrolled. Somatic genetic aberrations associated with activation of RAS-RAF signaling pathway were identified in 95% of the cohort with BRAF fusion being the most common aberration followed by the BRAF V600E mutation. These findings confirm the presence of targetable mutations in this specific population and provide a foundation for the use of targeted therapy. Diencephalic syndrome is a rare neurologic disorder typically affecting infants and young children with tumors located in the diencephalon. In this cohort, 43% of the optic pathway and hypothalamic gliomas manifested diencephalic syndrome. Among 30 patients who received first line chemotherapy, primary carboplatin and vincristine, the two-year and five-year progression-free survival rate were only 24% and 6.4% respectively, indicating that most patients experience disease progression with chemotherapy. Targeted therapy was administered to 27 patients of whom 22 experienced disease progression during or after chemotherapy. A total of 26 patients were available for evaluation. Dr. Papusha reported that all patients benefited from targeted therapy with 12 achieving a partial response, 2 showing a minor response and 12 maintaining stable disease. The median duration of targeted therapy was 16 months. These findings demonstrate the efficacy of targeted therapy in this population. Regarding toxicity from targeted therapy in this population, the most common adverse event was grade 1 to 2 skin toxicity observed in 52% of patients. Severe toxicity occurred in 36% of patients treated with trametinib including grade 3 skin toxicity, mucositis and hematuria. Additionally, grade 3 gastrointestinal toxicity was reported. Interestingly, all three patients who experienced grade 3 gastrointestinal toxicity had diencephalic syndrome at the time of targeted therapy initiation. The author also noted cases of disease progression during treatment breaks. However, tumor response was restored in all affected patients upon resumption of targeted therapy. The two-year progression-free survival rate was 59%. In conclusion, Dr. Papusha states the unique characteristics of infantile midline low grade glioma, including the high prevalence of diencephalic syndrome and resistance to chemotherapy. The study contributes valuable information on the targetable mutation profile in this population and provides further evidence supporting the use of targeted therapy while emphasizing the need for low monitoring of severe adverse events. As the author notes, important questions remain regarding the long term side effects of kinase inhibitors in infants and children as well as optimal duration of therapy. Thank you for listening to JCO Precision Oncology Article Insights and please tune in for the next topic. Don't forget to give us a rating or review and be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. You can find all ASCO shows at asco.org/podcasts.   The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions. Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience and conclusions. Guest statements on the podcast do not express the opinions of ASCO. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement.  

JCO PO author Dr. Hatim Husain at University of California San Diego, shares insights into his JCO PO article, “Adagrasib Treatment After Sotorasib-Related Hepatotoxicity in Patients With KRASG12C-Mutated Non–Small Cell Lung Cancer: A Case Series and Literature Review”, one of the top downloaded articles of 2024. Host Dr. Rafeh Naqash and Dr. Husain discuss how to utilize real-world and clinical trial data to discern the safety of adagrasib (another KRASG12C inhibitor), following sotorasib discontinuation due to hepatotoxicity. TRANSCRIPT Dr. Rafeh Naqash: Hello and welcome to JCO Precision Oncology Conversations where we bring you engaging conversations with authors of clinically relevant and highly significant JCOPO articles. I'm your host, Dr. Rafeh Naqash, Podcast Editor for JCO Precision Oncology and Assistant Professor at the OU Stephenson Cancer Center.  Today, I'm very excited to be joined by Dr. Hatim Hussain, Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Diego, and author of the JCO Precision Oncology article, “Adagrasib Treatment After Sotorasib-Related Hepatotoxicity in Patients With KRAS-G12C-Mutated Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer: A Case Series and Literature Review.” This was one of the top downloaded articles of 2024. And the other interesting thing is we generally don't do podcasts for case reports or case series, so this is one of the very few that we have selected for the podcast.  And at the time of the recording, our guest disclosures will be linked in the transcript.  Dr. Hussain, welcome to our podcast and thank you for joining us today. Dr. Hatim Husain: Thank you Dr. Naqash. Such a pleasure to be here and to speak with you all. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: And for the sake of this podcast, we'll refer to each other using our first names. So again, as I mentioned earlier that this is one of the very few case reports that we have selected for podcasts in JCOPO and the intention was very deliberate because it caters to something that is emerging where we are trying to treat more KRAS mutant patients with different KRAS inhibitors. And you tried to address one very unique aspect of it in this article which pertains to toxicity, especially hepatotoxicity. So for the sake of our listeners who tend to be community oncologists, trainees, academic faculty, can you tell us what are KRAS inhibitors? What is KRAS-G12C? And how do some of these approved KRAS inhibitors try to inhibit KRAS-G12C? Dr. Hatim Husain: Sure. For a long time actually we've not had a selective way to inhibit mutant KRAS. And over the last several years actually now, we've seen some dramatic advances here, particularly with the FDA approval of some of the selective inhibitors against the G12C variant. So KRAS-G12C is an isoform of KRAS that is most common in lung cancer and in fact actually is a transversion mutation in the KRAS gene that is a product of the carcinogen of tobacco. And in fact, the incidence of KRAS-G12C in lung cancer, it's quite astounding where as many KRAS-G12C patients there are, there can be, as you know, more than EGFR patients in certain populations and cohorts. The medicines sotorasib and adagrasib were rationally designed to be selective KRAS-G12C inhibitors. And the way that they do this is that they lock the KRAS protein in the OFF state. KRAS is a protein that oscillates between an ON and an OFF state and by virtue of locking the protein in an OFF state, it has shown inhibition of downstream signaling and mitigation of tumor growth and, in fact, tumor cell death. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: I absolutely love the way you describe the ON and OFF state, the oscillation where the ON is bound to the GTP and the OFF is bound to the GDP. The two KRAS inhibitors as currently FDA approved, as you mentioned, are RAS OFF inhibitors and they're emerging KRAS inhibitors that are RAS ON. So now, as we have known from previous data related to immunotherapy and EGFR TKIs such as osimirtinib where toxicity tends to be a compounded effect when you have osimertinib given within a certain timeline of previous checkpoint therapy, we've seen that in the clinic as the data for these KRAS inhibitors is emerging, you talk about some very interesting aspects and data about what has been published so far with regards to prior use of immunotherapy or chemo immunotherapy and the subsequent use of KRAS inhibitors. Could you elaborate upon that? Dr. Hatim Husain: Sure. So for this population of patients, the first line approved strategy is a strategy that most cases will incorporate immune therapy and chemotherapy. Immune therapy can have some important responses for patients with KRAS-G12C. This may be due to the fact that KRAS-G12C patients may have a higher incidence of prior smoking, perhaps higher mutation burdens in some patients, and perhaps immunogenicity is defined in that context. So the standard of care in the first line currently includes immune therapy or immune therapy and chemotherapy. Where the current FDA approvals for selective G12C inhibitors are are after the first line of therapy. There are a number of trials exploring these medicines in the first line to see if they may be incorporated into a future treatment paradigm. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: Thank you for that explanation. Now, going to what you published in this manuscript, can you help us understand the context of why you looked at this? Even though the data just comprises a case series of a handful of patients, but the observations are very interesting and these are real world scenarios where we often tend to be in situations where an individual has had toxicity on a certain drug and may have some response to that drug, but at the same time, the toxicity is challenging. And then you try to debate whether another drug in the same class might be beneficial without those toxicities. So you've tried to address that to some extent using this data set. So can you elaborate upon the question, the methodology, what you tried to look at, and important observations that you have? Dr. Hatim Husain: Yes, our paper was actually inspired by one of my patients. My patient was a patient who had received chemotherapy and immune therapy and actually in the past, even, you know, additional lines of immune therapies, it was really coming to the edge of where standard treatments would exist. It was right at the same time that these selective inhibitors had been approved and the patient had received sotorasib. And what was remarkable was, when given sotorasib, patient had a very high peak and spike in the transaminases. And we would do different trials of strategies around dose, around interruptions. And it was becoming quite difficult, actually, for the patient to proceed with additional therapy. It was around similar times, actually, and I do want to make a note that the patient was progressing, driven in large fact by the fact that we've had to interrupt the medicine. So we feel and believe that the patient had had inadequate dosing because of the level of toxicity that the patient was having with transaminase increase. So it was around the same time that adagrasib was first commercially available that we were at that point, and we did a trial of adagrasib post-sotorasib, largely driven by necessity, without having additional options to provide this patient in our environment. What was remarkable was when the patient received the adagrasib, there were no spikes in transaminases similar to what we had seen before. And that really led us thinking and to say, “Is this adverse event of transaminase increase or hepatotoxicity, is this a class effect with KRAS-G12C inhibitors, or is it more nuanced than that? Are there different, perhaps, mechanisms by which the medicines may work that may more or less differentially contribute to this adverse event?” And so that inspired us to kind of do a larger analysis, kind of really reach out to a larger network of physicians to gather insights and to gather responses in patients who had had a serial approach of sotorasib and then adagrasib.  What we found in this process was, in fact, actually there were many more cases of patients who resembled my patient, where the sequence of sotorasib going to adagrasib may have demonstrated differential contribution of hepatotoxicity in that context. And that really motivated us to put the publication together to due diligence, and in the publication spend a lot of time to kind of outline each patient case in detail around metrics surrounding time from last immune therapy, the number of days on sotorasib, the best response to sotorasib, the interval between sotorasib and adagrasib, the duration of adagrasib and then the grade of hepatotoxicity seen in each of the contexts, and particularly kind of the adagrasib and patient disease status as well. We were quite inspired by the effort to try to, if we do not have randomized data in comparison of one medicine to another, which we do not at this juncture, we do not have a randomized analysis to really diligently and rigorously compare the rates of AEs across each medicine, and even in sequence, we do not have that with immune therapy. But what we felt was trying to get more analysis of this sequential approach of, if patients had received a medicine, had to be taken off because of toxicity and then actually tried on a new medicine, what were those rates? We felt like that was at least some information to try to get at this question. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: And you bring forward a very important point, which is, a lot of times in the real world setting we don't have cross trial comparisons that can be fully applicable, or we don't have trials that compare two drugs of the same class with respect to the AE profile or efficacy. And observations like the one that you described that led to this study are extremely critical in trying to help answer these questions.  From a data standpoint, and you allude to it to some extent in your manuscript, the trials that are trying to address combination of KRAS-G12C with immunotherapy, especially sotorasib or adagrasib, can you elaborate on that data, what has been published so far and summarize it for our listeners? Dr. Hatim Husain: So there is data from clinical trials looking at patients actually who have received concomitant immune therapy and sotorasib. What was seen in this, in a real world analysis, was that some patients actually who had received sotorasib within a close proximity of immune therapy, as well as a larger study actually which showed in combination there were higher rates of hepatotoxicity in that context. In fact, there were rates of grade 3 hepatotoxicity. And I think built upon that data there's a recognition in the field that we have to be very diligent in terms of even the clinical trial designs in how to understand the pairing between immune therapy and selective G12C inhibitors. There are many trials that are ongoing, one of the studies that is ongoing is known as the KRYSTAL-7 study, which is evaluating adagrasib in combination with pembrolizumab in the first line. And we await more information on that strategy as well. In the context of sotorasib, because of some of the trials that have shown higher rates of hepatotoxicity, there are some additional trials now looking at sotorasib in combination with chemotherapy, and those also have some information that have been reported as well. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: From a drug development standpoint, as you mentioned, there's always a tendency to combine something with something else. And in my practice, and I'm sure in your practice too, when we do early phase trials, many trials are still focused on choosing the maximum tolerated dose, which may be something that we need to gradually move away from as we try to implement these combinations of multiple antibodies plus some of these target agents from maybe the biological optimal dose rather than the maximal tolerant dose is a better way to look at the drugs, the pharmacokinetic profile, and then see what is likely the safest combination with the most appropriate target engagement. Do you have any thoughts on that or insights on that from a drug development perspective? Dr. Hatim Husain: It's a wonderful question and I think it is a very insightful question and understanding of where we are in space right now. And I agree with you that historically, cancer drug development was really hinged upon medicines that perhaps required higher doses to see a benefit or to inch out kind of marginal increases upon where we were at. Now, in combination with medicines that have non-overlapping mechanisms of action, the concept is: Can there actually be more synergy across an approach using combinatorial strategies rather than just additive effects? And I think that in some cases this is being studied with immune therapy, in some cases actually even in the context of other novel mechanisms for cancer therapy. I think that in my practice, I will really try to see how a patient at an approved dose will respond. But definitely I'm open to the concept that there may be a dose that doesn't have to be the maximally tolerated dose, but rather the dose that responses can be seen and perhaps actually at a lower dose than what drives many toxicities. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: I often describe this to my patients as individual patient dose optimization outside of a clinical trial, where I'm sure you've probably done this, where in older adults maybe a lower dose of osimertinib is tolerated better, or a lower dose of sotorasib or adagrasib for that matter, tolerated better with perhaps a similar level of efficacy, since we don't have comparisons between doses and efficacy so far.  So I think in the bigger picture, as we discussed in a nutshell, what I would really like the listeners to understand is as we try to move towards this field of precision medicine targeting more and more of the undruggable genes, there's bound to be a certain level of toxicity patterns that we'll start observing. So I think these real world scenarios which may not be addressed using clinical trials because it is in the real world setting where you cycle one treatment after another after another, which may or may not be allowed in most trials and the real world setting can inform, in certain cases, subsequent trial designs. So I think the most important message, at least that I took from your manuscript, was that these real world observations can make a huge difference and inform practice, even though the data sets may be small. Of course, you want to validate some of these findings in a bigger, broader setting, but proof of concept is there. And I think next time I see an individual in my clinic where I see better toxicity, I'll definitely try to talk to them about subsequent treatment with another KRAS inhibitor, maybe adagrasib or something else, if and when appropriate.  Do you have any closing thoughts on some of these things that we discussed? Dr. Hatim Husain: I just want to leave the audience actually with this concept that sometimes we group targeted therapy side effects as being class effects unanimously. And I do think actually that each inhibitor may have different off target effects on where medicine may act. We don't truly understand the mechanism of hepatotoxicity in the context of selective KRAS-G12C inhibitors. One of the hypotheses may be due to off target cysteine reactivity in the numerous off target binding sites that certain medicines may have over others. And just even qualitatively which off target binding sites there may be, and how that may lead to either immunogenic responses and other organs or such. So I do think that we do need more research to understand the mechanism. But I think where we are at right now in this space is not assuming that all medicines are going to have the exact same toxicity. I think especially when patients may not have other options, this is something to consider as well. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: Thank you so much. Now, outside of the scientific insights, Hatim, I know you a little bit from before. And knowing the kind of work that you've done in precision medicine, I'm really interested to know about where you started, how you started, how things have been, and what kind of advice you have for junior faculty fellows who are interested in this field of precision medicine that is becoming more and more exciting as we progress in the oncology space. Dr. Hatim Husain: Thank you, Rafeh. I will say, actually as a medical student, I was actually very interested in oncology, partly because it was then and still remains one disease or a constellation of diseases that just has such a high psychological burden on patients. And through the experiences I've had, I really can understand and relate with that concept. I did my medical school at Northwestern, residency at the University of Southern California, and then my oncology fellowship at Johns Hopkins University.  And now I've been on faculty at University of California, San Diego, for about 12 years now. It's been a great experience paralleled with the fact that during these last 12 years, I've really seen how the developments in precision oncology, both targeted therapy as well as immune therapy, have really blossomed and unfolded. A large area of my research in my career has kind of focused on cancer genome and integration of novel technologies to really see how they may have clinical application. When I was in my fellowship and as a young faculty, the liquid biopsy was actually coming into development. And this was hinged upon information that had come forward in the prenatal space where some patients actually who were undergoing prenatal testing during pregnancy were found to have complex karyotypes and genomic alterations and then retrospectively found to have cancer.  And doing my fellowship at Johns Hopkins, some of the pioneers in liquid biopsy were my mentors and really kind of instilled in me that passion for really thinking through how cancer genomics can be integrated through time. And some of the research that I have been doing has been looking at clonal evolution of cancer, how cancer is changing over time, and how we can think through the right surveillance strategies to really understand how that change is occurring. The dynamics of ctDNA in retrospective cohorts have been studied and shown that, you know, there can be associations between progression-free survival and other clinical endpoints. The current paper that we are speaking about parallels that in a certain way where, rather than say, looking at clonal evolution and say, the efficacy answer of sotorasib first and then adagrasib and how frequently can adagrasib salvage patients, this looks at it from a different angle around toxicity. And I think that is a key point because, at my core, I really do enjoy the clinical aspect of complex decision making on behalf of patients weighing efficacy and toxicity that they may have as they try to get the best quality of life through this journey. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: Thank you again, Hatim, for all those insights, both from the scientific perspective as well as personal perspective. We appreciate that you chose JCOPO as the destination for your work.  And thank you for listening to JCO Precision Oncology Conversations. Don't forget to give us a rating or review and be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. You can find all ASCO shows at asco.org/podcasts.   The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions.  Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience, and conclusions. Guest statements on the podcast do not express the opinions of ASCO. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity, or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement. Dr. Hatem Husain Disclosures Consulting or Advisory Role: AstraZeneca, Foundation Medicine, Janssen, NeoGenomics Laboratories, Mirati Speakers' Bureau: AstraZeneca, Janssen Institution Research Funding: Pfizer, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Regeneron, Lilly Travel, Accommodations, Expenses: AstraZeneca, Janssen, Foundation Medicine  

In this JCO PO Article Insights episode, Harold Nathan Tan summarizes findings from the JCO PO article, “Circulating Tumor DNA as a Prognostic Biomarker for Recurrence in Patients With Locoregional Esophagogastric Cancers With a Pathologic Complete Response.” TRANSCRIPT Harold Nathan Tan: Welcome to JCO Precision Oncology Article Insights where we explore cutting-edge discoveries in the world of cancer treatment and research. I'm Harold Nathan Tan, your host for today's episode. Let's dive into a fascinating study published in JCO Precision Oncology entitled, “Circulating Tumor DNA as a Prognostic Biomarker for Recurrence in Patients With Locoregional Esophagogastric Cancers With a Pathologic Complete Response.” This study led by Dr. Eric Michael Lander and colleagues examines a critical question: Can circulating tumor DNA help predict recurrence in patients with esophagogastric cancer who have achieved a favorable pathologic response after treatment? Esophagogastric cancer ranks as the seventh leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide. Despite aggressive treatment including neoadjuvant therapy followed by surgery, recurrence remains a grim reality for many patients. Interestingly, even those who achieve a pathologic complete response face a recurrence risk of up to 25%. This highlights a need for better tools to identify high-risk patients post-treatment. Circulating tumor DNA, or ctDNA for short, is emerging as a powerful biomarker in oncology. This minimally invasive blood-based test detects fragments of tumor DNA in the bloodstream, potentially signaling molecular residual disease before any radiographic evidence of recurrence appears. In this study, researchers focused on patients with locoregional esophagogastric cancer who had undergone neoadjuvant therapy followed by surgery, achieving either a complete or near complete pathologic response. Blood samples were collected postoperatively within a 16-week molecular residual disease window and during routine surveillance. The aim is to determine whether ctDNA positivity correlates with recurrence-free survival. The study analyzed 309 plasma samples from 42 patients across 11 institutions. Detectable ctDNA within the 16-week postoperative window was associated with a significantly higher recurrence risk. Among those with detectable ctDNA, 67% experienced recurrence compared to only 15% for those with undetectable ctDNA. This corresponds to a hazard ratio of 6.2, an alarming figure that underscores the potential for ctDNA as a prognostic tool. But the story doesn't end there. Postoperative surveillance ctDNA testing more than 16 weeks after surgery also proved to be a powerful prognostic indicator. Every patient with detectable ctDNA during surveillance eventually experienced recurrence, while only 7.4% of those with undetectable ctDNA relapse. These findings suggest that ctDNA testing could provide a critical lead time, enabling earlier interventions and personalized treatment strategies. Now let's talk about the clinical implications. Currently, patients who achieve a pathologic complete response often aren't considered for adjuvant therapies as the absence of visible disease is taken as a sign of remission. However, this study challenges that assumption. By integrating ctDNA testing into routine post-treatment surveillance, clinicians could identify high-risk patients who might benefit from additional therapy even when traditional imaging shows no signs of recurrence. This brings us to the bigger picture. Esophagogastric cancer treatment is evolving rapidly, with trials like CheckMate 577 and ESOPEC offering new insights into perioperative strategies. However, this study highlights a critical gap, the need for personalized, biomarker-driven approaches in the adjuvant setting. ctDNA could fill that gap, offering a non-invasive, dynamic way to monitor patients and guide clinical decisions. Of course, no study is without its limitations. The authors acknowledge the relatively small sample size and the retrospective nature of their analysis. They also note the variability in ctDNA testing and imaging schedules across institutions. However, the robust association between ctDNA positivity and recurrence-free survival makes a compelling case for further research in larger prospective cohorts. Looking ahead, what's the next step? The authors call for prospective validation of ctDNA as a prognostic tool, emphasizing its potential to refine risk stratification and optimize treatment strategies. Imagine a future where a simple blood test could dictate not only the need for additional therapies, but also the timing and type of intervention. As we wrap up, let's reflect on the broader impact of the study. By integrating ctDNA into routine cancer care, we could move closer to a world where treatments are not just effective, but also precisely tailored to each patient's unique biology and disease dynamics. Thank you for tuning into JCO Precision Oncology Article Insights. Don't forget to subscribe and join us next time as we explore more groundbreaking research shaping the future of oncology. Until then, stay informed and stay inspired.   The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions. Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience, and conclusions. Guest statements on the podcast do not express the opinions of ASCO. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity, or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement.  

JCO PO author Dr. David R. Gandara at UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center, shares insights into his JCO PO article, “Plasma Proteome–Based Test for First-Line Treatment Selection in Metastatic Non–Small Cell Lung Cancer,” one of the Top Articles of 2024. Host Dr. Rafeh Naqash and Dr. Gandara discuss how the PROphet® blood test supports first-line immunotherapy treatment decisions for metastatic NSCLC patients. TRANSCRIPT  Dr. Rafeh Naqash: Hello and welcome to JCO Precision Oncology Conversations where we bring you engaging conversations with authors of clinically relevant and highly significant JCOPO articles. I'm your host, Dr. Rafeh Naqash, Podcast Editor for JCO Precision Oncology and Assistant Professor at the OU Health Stephenson Cancer Center at the University of Oklahoma.  Today, we are absolutely thrilled to be joined by Dr. David R. Gandara, Professor of Medicine Emeritus, Co-Director of the Center for Experimental Therapeutics and Cancer and Senior Advisor to the Director at UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center and also the senior author of the JCO Precision Oncology article entitled “Plasma Proteome–Based Test for First-Line Treatment Selection in Metastatic Non–Small Cell Lung Cancer.” This was one of the top performing articles of 2024, which is one of the reasons why we wanted to bring it in for a podcast discussion. At the time of this recording, our guest’s disclosures will be linked in the transcript.  David, it is an absolute pleasure to have you today. For somebody like you who's led the field of lung cancer over the years, I'm really excited that you are going to be talking to us about this very interesting article, especially given that I think you're one of the big proponents of liquid biopsies and plasma-based testing. So, for the sake of our listeners - which comprises of academic oncologists, community oncologists, trainees - could you tell us where the biomarker landscape for non-small cell lung cancer is currently, and then we can try to take a deeper dive into this article. Dr. David Gandar: Okay. Well, thank you, Rafeh. It's a pleasure to be with you here today. And I think the current landscape for biomarkers for immunotherapy in non-small cell lung cancer is a mess. There's no better way to describe it. That makes this paper describing a new plasma proteomic assay even more important. So I'll just give you a perspective. There are 14 trials, phase three trials, that were done in first line non-small cell lung cancer advanced stage of immunotherapy versus chemotherapy and some other aspects, although they vary tremendously. Some of them were checkpoint monotherapy, some combined with chemotherapy, some combined with CTLA-4 inhibitors and so forth. 12 out of the 14 were positive, 12 got FDA approval. So there are 12 different options that an oncologist could use. Some of them were squamous cell only, some non-squamous, some used PD-L1 as a biomarker driven part of the study. Some used TMB, tumor mutational burden, some were agnostic. So when you put all of this together, an oncologist can pick and choose among all these various regimens. And by and large, it's PD-L1 that is the therapeutic decision maker.  ASCO actually, I think, has done the very best job of making a guideline, and it's, as you well know, called a living guideline, it's dynamic. And it is much easier to interpret, for me and I think for oncologists, than some of the other guidelines. It's got a green light and a red light, it may be kind of orange. And so the green light means this is a strong recommendation by the guideline committee. The orange means it's weak. For this purpose, non-small cell lung cancer, advanced stage, only a very few of the recommendations were green. It's mainly monotherapy and patients with cancers with a PD-L1 over 50%. In our surveys, at our meetings, less than 50% of oncologists in the United States are following these guidelines. Why? Because they don't trust the biomarker. And TMB has the same sort of limitations. They're not bad biomarkers, they're incomplete. They're only looking at a part of the story. So that means we need a new biomarker. And this is one that, I think, the data are quite impressive and we'll discuss it more. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: Absolutely. Like you said, abundance of many therapy options, but not necessarily everything works the same in different subsets of PD-L1 positivity or different subsets of patients with different levels of tumor burden. And like you said, again, difficulty in trying to identify the right biomarker. And that's a nice segue to this PROphet test that you guys ran. So can you tell us a little bit about the plasma proteomic assay? Because to the best of my knowledge, there's not a lot of validated plasma proteomic assays. A lot has been done on the tumor tissue side as far as biomarkers are concerned, but not much on the blood side, except for maybe ctDNA MRD testing. So what was the background for trying to develop a plasma-based proteomic test? And then how did this idea of testing it in the lung cancer setting come into play? And then we can go into the patient population specifics, the cohort that you guys have. Dr. David Gandara: Okay. Well, of course there's a company behind this assay, it's called OncoHost, and I'm a consultant for them. And they came to me two years ago and they said, “We have something different from anyone else.” And they explained the science to me, as well as some other lung cancer experts here in the United States. I'm not a proteomic expert, of course, but they developed an AI machine learning platform to assess plasma proteins in normal people and in people with cancer, and specifically then in people with non-small cell lung cancer. They identified over 7,000 proteins that had cancer implications for therapy, for resistance, for prognosis, etc., and they categorized them based on the literature, TCGA data, etc., and used this machine learning process to figure out which proteins might be most specific for non-small cell lung cancer. And that's where they started. And so out of that 7,000 proteins, where they've identified which ones are angiogenic, which ones are involved with EMT or cell cycle or whatever it might be, they distilled it down to 388 proteins which they thought were worth testing in non-small cell lung cancer. And that's when I became involved.  They had a retrospective cohort of patients that had been treated with various immunotherapies. They looked at the analytic validation first, then applied it to this cohort. It looked good. Then they had a very large cohort, which they split, as you usually do with an assay, into a test set and then a validation set. For the test set, they wanted something more than a response. They wanted some indicator of long term benefit because that's where immunotherapy differentiates itself from chemotherapy and even targeted therapy. And so they picked PFS at 12 months. And I became involved at that point and it looked really good. I mean, if you look at the figures in the manuscript, the AUC is superb about their prediction and then what actually happened in the patient. And then in this paper, we applied it to a validation set of over 500 patients in a prospective trial, not randomized, it's called an observational trial. The investigator got to pick what they thought was the best therapy for that patient. And then in a blinded fashion, the proteomic assay experts did the analysis and applied it to the group.  And so what that means is some of the patients got chemotherapy alone, some got checkpoint immunotherapy monotherapy, some got in combination with chemotherapy. None of the patients in this study got a CTLA-4 inhibitor. That work is ongoing now. But what the study showed was that this assay can be used together with PD-L1 as what I would call a composite biomarker. You take the two together and it informs the oncologist about the meaning of that PD-L1. I'll give you an example. If that patient has a PD-L1 over 50% in their cancer and yet the PROphet test is negative, meaning less than 5 - it's a 0 to 10 scale - that patient for survival is better served by getting chemotherapy and immunotherapy. However, if the PROphet test is positive and the PD-L1 is over 50%, then the survival curves really look equivalent. As I said earlier, even in that group of patients, a lot of oncologists are reluctant to give them monotherapy. So if you have a test and the same sort of example is true for PD-L1 0, that you can differentiate. So this can really help inform the oncologist about what direction to go. And of course then you use your clinical judgment, you look at what you think of as the aggressiveness of the tumor or their liver metastases, etc. So again, that's how this test is being used for non-small cell lung cancer. And maybe I'll stop there and then I'll come back and add some other points. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: I definitely like your analogy of this therapy de-escalation strategy. Like you mentioned for PD-L1 high where the PROphet test is negative, then perhaps you could just go with immunotherapy alone. In fact, interestingly enough, I was invited to a talk at SITC a couple of weeks back and this exact figure that you're referring to was one of the figures in my slide deck. And it happened by chance that I realized that we were doing a podcast on the same paper today.  So I guess from a provocative question standpoint, when you look at the PD-L1 high cohort in the subset where you didn't see a survival difference for chemo plus immunotherapy versus immunotherapy alone, do you think any element of that could have been influenced by the degree of PD-L1 positivity above 50%? Meaning could there have been a cohort that is, let's say PD-L1 75 and above, and that kind of skews the data because I know you've published on this yourself also where the higher the PD-L1 above 50%, like 90% PD-L1 positivity survival curves are much better than 50% to 89%. So could that have somehow played a role? Dr. David Gandara: The first thing to say is that PD-L1 and the PROphet score, there's very little overlap. I know that sounds surprising, but it's also true for tumor mutational burden. There's very little overlap. They're measuring different things. The PD-L1 is measuring a specific regulatory protein that is applicable to some patients, but not all. That's why even in almost all of the studies, people with PD-L1 0 could still have some survival benefit. But in this case they're independent. And not in this paper, but in other work done by this group, the PROphet group, they've shown that the PROphet score does not seem to correlate with super high PD-L1. So it's not like the cemiplimab data where if you have a PD-L1 of greater than 90%, then of course the patient does spectacularly with monotherapy. The other thing that's important here is they had a group of around a little less than 100 patients that got chemotherapy alone. The PROphet score is agnostic to chemotherapy. And so that means that you're not just looking at some prognostic factor. It's actually clinical utility on a predictive basis. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: I think those are very important points. I was on a podcast a couple of days back. I think there's a theme these days we're trying to do for JCO Precision Oncology, we're trying to do a few biomarker based podcasts, and the most recent one that we did was using a tissue transcriptome with ctDNA MRD and you mentioned the composite of the PD-L1 and the PROphet test and they use a composite of the tissue transcriptome. I believe they called it the VIGex test as well as MRD ctDNA. And when your ctDNA was negative at, I believe, the three month mark, those individuals had the highest inflamed VIGex test or highest infiltration of T cells, STING pathway, etc. So are there any thoughts of trying to add or correlate tissue based biomarkers or ctDNA based correlations as a further validation in this research with the company? Dr. David Gandara: Right. So there are many things that are being looked at, various composites looking at the commutations that might affect the efficacy of immunotherapy and how they correlate with profit positivity or negativity. And I'll just give the examples of STK11 and KEAP1. As you know, there's some controversy about whether these are for immunotherapy, whether they're more prognostic or predictive. I'm one of the co-authors among many in the recently published Nature paper by Dr. Skoulidis and the group at MD Anderson which report that for KEAP1 positive especially, but also SDK11 mutated getting immunotherapy, that that's where the CTLA-4 inhibitors actually play the greatest role. So realizing that this is still controversial, there are preliminary data, not published yet, that'll be presented at an upcoming meeting, looking at many of these other aspects, P53, SCK11, KEAP1, other aspects, TMB, that's actually already published, I think in one of their papers. So yes, there's lots of opportunities.  The other cool thing is that this isn't a test, it's a platform. And so that means that the OncoHost scientists have already said, “What if we look at this test, the assay in a group of patients with small cell lung cancer?” And so I just presented this as a poster at the world conference in San Diego. And it turns out if you look at the biology of small cell, where neither PD-L1 nor TMB seem to be very important, if you look at the biology of small cell and you form an assay, it only shares 44 proteins out of the 388 with non-small cell. It's a different biology. And when we applied that to a group of patients with small cell lung cancer, again it had really pretty impressive results, although still a fairly small number of patients. So we have a big phase three study that we're doing with a pharmaceutical company developing immunotherapy where we are prospectively placing the PROphet test in a small cell trial.  The platform can also be altered for other cancer types. And at AACR, Dr. Jarushka Naidoo presented really impressive data that you can modify the proteins and you can predict immunotherapy side effects. So this is not like a company that says, “We have one test that's great for everything.” You know how some companies say, “Our test, you can use it for everything.” This company is saying we can alter the protein structures using AI machine learning assisted process to do it and we can have a very informed assay in different tumor types and different situations. So to me, it's really exciting. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: Definitely to me, I think, combining the AI machine learning aspect with the possibility of finding or trying to find a composite biomarker using less invasive approaches such as plasma or blood, definitely checks a lot of boxes. And as you mentioned, trying to get it to prospective trials as an integral biomarker perhaps would be likely the next step. And hopefully we see some interesting, exciting results where we can try to match or stratify patients into optimal combination therapies based on this test.  So now to the next aspect of this discussion, David, which I'm really excited about. You've been a leader and a mentor to many. You've led ISLC and several other corporate group organizations, et cetera. Can you tell us, for the sake of all the listeners, junior investigators, trainees, what being a mentor has meant for you? How your career has started many years back and how it's evolved? And what are some of the things that you want to tell people for a successful and a more exciting career as you've led over the years? Dr. David Gandara: Well, thank you for the question. Mentoring is a very important part of my own career. I didn't have an institutional mentor when I was a junior investigator, but I had a lot of senior collaborators, very famous people that kind of took me under their wing and guided me. And I thought when I basically establish myself, I want to give back by being a mentor to other people. And you wouldn't believe the number of people that I'm even mentoring today. And some of them are not medical oncologists, they're surgeons, they're radiation oncologists, they're basic scientists. Because you don't have to be an expert in that person's field to be a mentor. It helps, but in other words, you can guide somebody in what are the decision making processes in your career. When is it time to move from this institution onward because you can't grow in the institution you're in, either because it's too big or it's too small? So I established a leadership academy in the Southwest Oncology Group, SWOG. I've led many mentoring courses, for instance, for ISLC, now for International Society Liquid Biopsy, where I'm the executive committee liaison for what's called The Young Committee. So ISLB Society, totally devoted to liquid biopsy, six years old now, we have a Young Committee that has a budget. They develop projects, they publish articles on their own, they do podcasts. So what I'm saying is those are all things that I think opens up opportunities. They're not waiting behind senior people, they are leading themselves.  We just, at our International Lung Cancer Congress, reestablished a fellows program where a group of fellows are invited to that Huntington beach meeting. It's now in its 25th year and we spend a day and a half with them, mentoring them on career building. I'll just give you my first, I have the “Letterman Top 10”. So my first recommendation is if all you have is lemons, make lemonade. And what I'm meaning is find what you can do at your institution if you're a junior person, what you can claim to be your own and make the very best of it. But then as you get further along in my recommendations, one of them is learn when to say ‘no’. Because as a junior investigator the biggest threat to your career is saying ‘yes’ to everybody and then you become overwhelmed and you can't concentrate. So I'll stop there. But anyway, yes, mentoring is a big part of my life. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: Well, thank you, David. This is definitely something that I'm going to try to apply to my career as well. And this has been an absolute pleasure, especially with all the insights that you provided, not just on the scientific side but also on the personal career side and the mentorship side. And hopefully we'll see more of this work that you and other investigators have led and collaborated on. perhaps more interesting plasma based biomarkers. And hopefully some of that work will find its home in JCO Precision Oncology. Thank you again for joining us today. Dr. David Gandara: My pleasure. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: And thank you for listening to JCO Precision Oncology Conversations. Don't forget to give us a rating or review and be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. You can find all ASCO shows at asco.org/podcasts.   The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions.  Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience and conclusions. Guest statements on the podcast do not express the opinions of ASCO. The mention of any product, service organization, activity or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement.   Dr. David Gandara Disclosures: Consulting or Advisory Role Company: Henlius USA, Foundation Medicine, Janssen Pharma, Merck & Co, Mirati Therapeutics, Regeneron, AstraZeneca, Guardant Health, Genentech, Exact Sciences  Research Funding Company: Amgen, Genentech, Astex Pharma  

JCO PO authors Dr. Philippe Bedard (Staff Medical Oncologist at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre and Professor of Medicine at University of Toronto) and Dr. Alberto Hernando Calvo (Medical Oncologist at Vall d´Hebron University Hospital) share insights into their JCO PO article, “Combined Transcriptome and Circulating Tumor DNA Longitudinal Biomarker Analysis Associates With Clinical Outcomes in Advanced Solid Tumors Treated With Pembrolizumab,” one of the top downloaded articles of 2024. Host Dr. Rafeh Naqash and Drs. Bedard and Hernando Calvo discuss how combined transcriptome and ctDNA longitudinal analysis associates with pembrolizumab outcomes. TRANSCRIPT Dr. Rafeh Naqash: Hello and welcome to JCO Precision Oncology Conversations where we bring you engaging conversations with authors of clinically relevant and highly significant JCO PO articles. I'm your host, Dr. Rafeh Naqash, podcast editor for JCO Precision Oncology and Assistant Professor at the OU Health Stephenson Cancer Center at the University of Oklahoma.  Today we are excited to be joined by Dr. Philippe Bedard, Staff Medical Oncologist at the Princess Margaret Cancer Center and Professor of Medicine at the University of Toronto, as well as by Dr. Alberto Hernando-Calvo, Medical Oncologist at the Vall d'Hebron University Hospital, both authors of the JCO Precision Oncology article titled, “Combined Transcriptome and Circulating Tumor DNA Longitudinal Biomarker Analysis Associates With Clinical Outcomes in Advanced Solid Tumors Treated With Pembrolizumab.”  Thank you for joining us today. Phil and Alberto. Dr. Alberto Hernando-Calvo: Thank you. Dr. Philippe Bedard: Great to be with you. Thanks for having us.  Dr. Rafeh Naqash: One of the reasons we do this podcast, as some of the listeners who listen to this podcast regularly may know, is to bring in novel approaches and try to understand how the field is moving towards a space where we are understanding biomarkers better. So your manuscript that was published in JCO Precision Oncology fulfills many of those criteria. And interestingly enough, I was at a conference at the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer last month earlier in November and a lot of excitement at SITC was revolving around novel transcriptomic biomarkers, proteomic biomarkers or imaging based biomarkers. So could you tell us a little bit about why you started looking at biomarkers? This is an extremely competitive field. Why did you think that looking at the transcriptome is somewhat different from or more interesting from tumor mutational burden PDL-1 than other biomarkers that we currently use? And that question is for you Alberto to start off.  Dr. Alberto Hernando-Calvo: So I think gene expression profiles may have a predictive performance as compared to already existing biomarkers and this was one of the points that we describe in our manuscript. The gene expression signature that we developed back in 2019 at Vall d'Hebron Institute of Oncology was initially developed based on over 45 different tumor types and tested in over 1000 patients treated with antiPD-1 and anti PDL-1. And back then and in this manuscript, we proved that for instance the gene expression signature VIGex that we developed has a potential complementary role to other predictive biomarkers. In this case, we observe this predictive power with ctDNA dynamics and we then see a correlation with other existing biomarkers such as tumor mutational burden. So I don't think we need to use one or the other, but rather they may have additive predictive power. So we need to better individualize predictive biomarkers based on tumor types and select the best combination possible to improve the performance.  Dr. Rafeh Naqash: I completely agree that one size does not fit all, especially in the landscape of immunotherapy. From your perspective, when you developed the original signature, how did you choose what genes to look at? I looked at the manuscript, on the methodology side, some of the signatures are pro-inflammatory STING interferon gamma based, so how did you try to identify that these are the 7 to 10 or whatever number of signatures on the transcriptome side? And then why did you try to combine it with ctDNA based changes?  Dr. Alberto Hernando-Calvo: Back in our initial manuscript, published in Med from Cell Press, we developed the VIGex gene expression signature, as I mentioned, with taking into consideration over 1000 tumor samples from FFPE that we can consider real world samples because they are from real patients coming from the clinic notes as part of real investigational protocol doing or performing biopsies on patients. We did observe after doing a VIGex research and doing different tests, we eventually collected these 12 different genes. Because there is a combination of both genes involved in the interferon gamma pathway, we have genes associated with Tregs as well as T cell memory cells. So it’s not only looking at genes that are associated with T cell activation or CD8+ T cell infiltration, but also looking at genes that may be overactivated, overexpressed, an immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment. So it was both selecting genes, the minimum number of genes to do it more scalable and having the minimum dataset of genes and including in the signature genes that are already at targets for immune sequent inhibitors or are being tested in immunotherapy combinations.  Dr. Rafeh Naqash: Thank you. And Phil, for the sake of our listeners, could you elaborate upon this aspect of using ctDNA? So this was tumor-informed ctDNA from what I understood in the manuscript. You guys basically try to use it to understand changes in the ctDNA with treatment and then try to combine it with the transcriptome signature. How did the idea come up initially and how did you plan on combining this with an RNA-based signature? Because I have seen manuscripts and other data where people are either using one or the other, but not necessarily both together. So how did you guys come up with that idea? Dr. Philippe Bedard: Well, we thought that this was a great opportunity to look at the combination of the transcriptome as well as the ctDNA dynamics because we had run an investigator-initiated phase 2 clinical trial called INSPIRE at our institution at Princess Margaret from 2016 to 2018, where patients across five different tumor groups received single agent pembrolizumab. And we really did a deep dive on these patients where there were tumor biopsies before and while on treatment. We did exome sequencing, we did RNA sequencing to capture the transcriptome. And in a prior analysis, we had partnered with Natera to look at their Signatera assay, which is a bespoke ctDNA assay, to look at ctDNA dynamics using this test and the association with response outcomes as well as survival outcomes. So we thought that this was a really unique data set to try and address the question of whether or not there was complementarity in terms of looking at the transcriptome and transcriptome signatures of IO benefit together with the ctDNA dynamics. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: From a patient treatment standpoint, it sounded like you mostly tried to include individuals who were treated with pembrolizumab. Did this not include individuals who were treated with chemoimmunotherapy or chemotherapy with pembrolizumab? Just pembrolizumab alone? And if that's the case, some of the tumor types there included, from what I remember, ovarian cancer and some other unusual cancers that don't necessarily have approvals for single agent pembrolizumab, but perhaps in the TMB-high setting. So can you elaborate on the patient selection there for the study?  Dr. Philippe Bedard: Yeah, that's a great question. So at the time that the study was designed in 2015, this was really the early days of immune checkpoint inhibitor therapy, so we didn't have the approvals that we have now in specific tumor types for immunotherapy and chemotherapy combinations. So when the study was designed as an investigator initiated clinical trial, the idea was really to capture patients across different tumor types - so head and neck squamous cell carcinoma, malignant melanoma, ovarian cancer, triple negative breast cancer, and a kind of mixed histology solid tumor cohort, where we knew that there were some patients who were going to be immunotherapy responsive, where there was already approvals or evidence of single agent activity, and others where the responses were more anecdotal, to try and understand in a phase 2 clinical trial with kind of a deep dive, which patients benefited from treatment and which didn't. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: Interesting approach. Going to the results, Alberto, could you help us understand some of the important findings from these data? Because there's different sections of how you tried to look at the response rates, the survival, looking at the immune deconvolution, if you could explain that. Dr. Alberto Hernando-Calvo: So the first thing that we tried was to further confirm the external validation of this immune gene expression signature, VIGex in the INSPIRE asset. So what we observed at VIGex-Hot, the category defined by VIGex-Hot tumor microenvironment, was associated with better progression free survival. After including that in a multivariable analysis adjusted by other biomarkers such as TMB, PDL-1 or tumor type, this was also confirmed for overall survival. So then the next step was to really try to hypothesize if the addition of ctDNA dynamics, taking into consideration the ctDNA quantification at baseline as compared to cycle three, if those dynamics could further improve the predictive performance of VIGex categories taken in the baseline samples. What we did observe was that, for instance, VIGex-Hot tumors in baseline tumor samples that were having a ctDNA decrease, as I mentioned before on cycle three assessment as compared to baseline, were having both better progression free survival and better prognosis overall. Another important finding was the evaluation of response rate across tumor types considering both biomarkers. I would say the most important finding is that when we were considering a cold tumor microenvironment in baseline samples before pembrolizumab initiation plus an increase in ctDNA values, what we observed is that those patients were having a 0% response rate. So this may help as a future strategy either for intensification of immunotherapy regimens in a more individualized way or for an early stop to immunotherapy and try to avoid financial toxicities as well as toxicities for our patients. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: From the data that you showed, it seems that there was a strong correlation, as you sort of mentioned, between individuals that had ctDNA clearance and baseline immune pro-inflammatory signatures. So do you really need the transcriptome signature or could the ctDNA just serve as an easy quick surrogate? Because from a cost standpoint, doing whole transcriptome sequencing or more RNA sequencing or tissue standpoint, where tissue is often limited, can become a big issue. So do you think that validation of this may perhaps more revolve around using ctDNA as an easier metric or surrogate? Or am I overestimating the utility of ctDNA? Dr. Philippe Bedard: I think it's a really good question. In our data set which was relatively small, there were 10 patients who had ctDNA clearance, meaning ctDNA that was positive at baseline was not detected. And so 9 out of those 10 patients, as you alluded to, were VIGex-Hot. So the question is a good one, could you do the same with just ctDNA clearance alone, particularly in identifying these patients who really do well, who have long term disease control on immunotherapy? I think it's a tough question to answer because the field is also changing in terms of sensitivity of detection of ctDNA tests. So we know now that there are newer generations of tests which can detect even at logs down in terms of allele variants in the circulation. So I think we need more data to address the question. I think it is important as to what is the best test, what is the endpoint that we should be using from a drug development point of view in terms of really trying to push and understand which treatment regimens are the most effective and have early readouts in terms of activity. Because we all recognize in the clinic that radiographic response doesn't tell the whole story, especially early radiographic assessments using RECIST or other criteria that we apply in clinical trials. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: From a clinical trial standpoint, we often talk about validation of these studies. You may have heard of other tests where, for example, the NCI iMatch, which is incorporating transcriptome sequencing based approach to stratify patients as an integral biomarker for treatment stratification. Is that something that you guys are thinking of using, this approach where individuals who are signature highly inflamed perhaps get lesser therapies or there's a de-intensification of some sort similar to what people are trying to do with ctDNA-based approaches? Dr. Philippe Bedard: I think that's a great question. I think it makes a lot of sense. And certainly, with the new wave antibody drug conjugates in terms of identifying patients who have expression of targets for antibody drug conjugates, that's very attractive as an approach because we don't necessarily have IHC markers for all of the different targets of antibody drug conjugates. We don't necessarily have IHC markers to completely understand different contributions to the tumor microenvironment and whether or not tumors are inflamed. But it's also a challenging approach too because RNA-seq currently is not a routine clinical test. Sometimes there are issues, particularly in patients who have stored specimens that are formalin-fixed and paraffin-embedded in terms of the quality of the RNA for RNA sequencing. And it's not always feasible to get pre-treatment biopsies and turn them around in an approach. So I think it is an attractive approach for clinical trials, but it's a hypothesis that needs to be tested. It's not something that is ready for clinical prime time today in 2024. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: One of the other interesting observations that I came across in your manuscript was that tumor mutational burden, interestingly, did not correlate with signature high tumors. What is the explanation for that? Because generally you would expect a TMB high to perhaps also have an immune gene high signature. Could it have something to do with the tumor types because there was a heterogeneous mixture of tumor type? Or I'm not sure. What else could you possibly think of that you didn't see those correlations or just sample size limitations? Dr. Alberto Hernando-Calvo: Yes. So our findings are consistent with prior data suggesting for instance T cell inflamed gene expression profile was also not correlated with tumor mutational burden and both biomarkers in a prior publication. So to have additive predictive performance for identifying patients most likely to benefit from anti PD-1 regimen, so we somehow were expecting this observation, the fact that both biomarkers are not very correlated. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: So given the proof of concept findings from your study, Phil, what is the next interesting step that you guys are thinking of to expand this? Would you think that a nivolumab-ipilimumab treated cohort would have similar findings? Or is this a treatment specific single agent immunotherapy specific correlation that you found versus something else that you may find in a nivo-ipi cohort or a doublet immune checkpoint cohort?  Dr. Philippe Bedard: The findings are really hypothesis generating. They require additional validation. And you're quite right, there may be nuances in terms of specific tumor types, combinations with other immunotherapy or combinations with chemotherapy or other agents. So I think it would be great if there are other data sets that are collecting this type of information that have ctDNA dynamics and also have transcriptome and potentially exome or genome analysis to look at these types of questions because the field is moving quickly and we really need more data sets in order to understand some of the nuances and greater numbers to validate the signals that we see. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: And one thing, as you said, the field is definitely moving very quickly. I was meeting with a company an hour back and they have an imaging-based approach using fresh tissue to look at pharmacodynamic biomarkers. And I used to work in the NCI with a group that was very interested and they developed an immuno-oncology pharmacodynamic panel that has been used and published in a few clinical trials where they did phosphorylation status. So the final theme that comes out of most of these research based studies that are being done is that one size does not fit all. But the question that comes to my mind is how many things do you necessarily need to combine to get to a predictive biomarker that is useful, that is patient centric, and that perhaps is able to identify the right therapy for the right patient. What is your take on that, Phil?  Dr. Philippe Bedard: Yeah, that's a great question too. The challenge is it depends on the context in terms of what degree of positive predictive value do you need as well as the negative predictive value to drive clinical decisions. So I think in certain situations where you don't have other approved treatment options and with a therapy that is potentially low toxicity and low financial toxicity, then I think the bar is very high in terms of being able to really confidently identify that patients aren't going to benefit. I think the nuance and the challenge becomes when you move into earlier lines of therapy, or when you talk about combinations of agents, or trying to understand within the context of other available options, particularly with treatments that have significant side effect profiles as well as financial risks, then it becomes a much more nuanced question and you really need comparative studies to understand how it fits versus the existing treatment paradigm. So I'm not really answering your question with a specific number because I think it's hard to give you a number. Some of that we also need input from patients in terms of what kind of level of validation do you need and what kind of level of discrimination do you need in order to drive decisions that are meaningful for them. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: Definitely early days, as you pointed out. More and more work in this field will hopefully lead us in the direction that we all want to go in.  Now, going to a different aspect of this podcast, which is trying to understand the trajectories for both of you, Phil and Alberto. And as you mentioned, this project seemed to have started in 2015. So I'm guessing there's a history there between Princess Margaret and Vall d'Hebron. Could you highlight that a little bit? And then perhaps, Alberto, after that you could tell us a little bit about your career when you worked at Princess Margaret as a fellow and then now back at Vall d'Hebron. Phil, you as well. Dr. Philippe Bedard: So absolutely. We have a long history of collaborating with Vall d'Hebron in Barcelona. It's really a great cancer institution with a lot of like minded individuals. We have a formal partnership and we have a lot of informal links in terms of scientists and clinicians who we work with and who we collaborate with on early phase clinical trials, as well as through different investigator networks and other translational projects. So this was really how this collaboration came about and we were fortunate to have Alberto, who came to work with us for two years and brought this great idea of looking at this signature they had developed at Vall d'Hebron in their phase one group and applying it to a data set that we had through the INSPIRE clinical trial.  Dr. Rafeh Naqash: Sounds like a very successful academia-academic collaboration, which is very nice to see. So, Alberto, could you tell us a little bit about your career trajectory and how you ended up at Princess Margaret and then back at Vall d'Hebron and what you do currently? Dr. Alberto Hernando-Calvo: Yes. So I did my oncology residency at Vall d'Hebron in Barcelona, Spain. Then I decided to further specialize in early drug development as well as head and neck cancer oncology. So I decided to pursue a clinical research fellowship under the supervision of Phil Bedard, among others. And so we decided to further validate the signature that we had developed both in the cancer genomic lab at Vall d'Hebron Institute of Oncology and the phase one unit at Vall d'Hebron, and apply the signature that have been originally tested in patients receiving anti PD-1 or anti PDL-1 combinations in early phase clinical trials. In the phase 2 clinical trial of INSPIRE, where we also had ctDNA dynamics and allowed us to test both biomarkers and see that additive predictive power when we were using both. That was one of my research topics under the mentorship of Dr. Bedard and my fellowship at Princess Margaret. And this was one of the manuscripts describing all the findings of this collaboration between Vall d'Hebron and Princess Margaret Cancer Center. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: And then, Phil, if you could highlight some of the things that you've done over the course of your career and perhaps some advice for early career junior investigators and trainees.  Dr. Philippe Bedard: I finished my oncology, medical oncology training at the University of Toronto in 2008. And then I did a breast cancer fellowship in Brussels at Breast International Group. At the time, I was really intrigued because it was really kind of the early days of microarray and RNA signatures in terms of expressing signatures were being used as part of a clinical trial that BIG was running called the MINDACT Study. And so when I finished my fellowship, I came back to Princess Margaret, started on staff. I've been here now for 15 years. I was fortunate to work with the phase 1 group and kind of my career has sort of morphed in terms of early drug development as well as genomics. I've been involved with the American Association for Cancer Research project GENIE, where I'm the current chair. This is really an international data sharing project with panel based sequencing, which both Princess Margaret and Vall d'Hebron have contributed to. And I’ve been fortunate to work with a number of really talented early career investigators like Alberto, who spend time with us in our drug development program and launched transitional research projects that leverage some existing data sets at their own institutions and also bring together with different research groups at our institution to lead to publications like this one. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: Thank you so much. This was very exciting. Phil and Albert, thanks for joining us today and thank you for allowing us to discuss your interesting manuscript and hopefully we'll see more of this biomarker work from you guys in the near future, perhaps published in JCO Precision Oncology.   And thank you for listening to JCO Precision Oncology Conversations. Don't forget to give us a rating or review and be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. You can find all ASCO shows at asco.org/podcasts.     The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions.  Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience and conclusions. Guest statements on the podcast do not express the opinions of ASCO. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity, or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement.

In this JCO Precision Oncology Article Insights episode, Miki Horiguchi summarizes two articles: “Germline Susceptibility to Renal Cell Carcinoma and Implications for Genetic Screening,” by Dr. Kate I. Glennon et al. published on August 01, 2024, and "Incidental Pathogenic Variants in Renal Cell and Urothelial Carcinoma: Is It Time for Universal Screening?” by Dr. Salvador Jaime-Casas, et al. published on August 01, 2024. TRANSCRIPT Miki Horiguchi: Hello and welcome to JCO Precision Oncology Article Insights. I'm your host Miki Horiguchi, an ASCO Journal's Editorial Fellow. Today, I'll be providing summaries of the article titled, "Germline Susceptibility to Renal Cell Carcinoma and Implications for Genetic Screening,” by Dr. Kate Glennon and colleagues. In the accompanying editorial titled, “Incidental Pathogenic Variants in Renal Cell and Urothelial Carcinoma: Is It Time for Universal Screening?” by Dr. Salvador Jaime-Casas and colleagues. Renal cell carcinoma (RCC) exhibits distinct clinical characteristics across its histological subtypes. Clear cell RCC accounts for approximately 75% of cases while the remaining non-clear cell RCC encompasses a diverse group of histology. Although a family history has been known to double the risk for RCC, genetic susceptibility, particularly across different histological subtypes and defined operations, has not been investigated well. Dr. Glennon and colleagues sought to identify risk genes for RCC within the Canadian population and investigate their clinical significance in comparison to cancer-free control populations. The authors conducted targeted sequencing of 19 RCC related genes and 27 cancer predisposition genes for 960 RCC patients in Canada. DNA samples were collected through the Ontario Tumour Bank between 2005 and 2019. For comparisons across histological subtypes, the cohort was divided into 759 patients with clear cell RCC and 201 patients with non-clear cell RCC, including all histological subtypes other than clear cell RCC. Non-cancer control data were obtained from a publicly available database which included over 118,000 cases from the European population. A total of 39 different germline pathogenic variants were identified in 56 patients representing 5.8% of the Canadian cohort. There was no significant difference in the overall number of germline pathogenic variants between the two groups. The most commonly identified germline pathogenic mutations were CHEK2, ATM/BRCA2 and MITF in the clear cell RCC group, and FH and CHEK2 in the non-clear cell RCC group. Compared to the non cancer control data, germline pathogenic variants in CHEK2 and ATM were significantly associated with an increased risk of developing clear cell RCC, while those in FH were significantly associated with non clear cell RCC. According to the bivariate association analysis between the presence of germline pathogenic variants and clinical characteristics, patients with metastatic RCC were strongly associated with pathogenic variants in BRCA1, BRCA2, and ATM. No other significant associations were observed. The authors then evaluated variations in germline pathogenic variants among RCC patients across the world using similar studies conducted in Canada, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Specifically, they compared the gene burden for significantly mutated genes in each of the cohorts against all other cohorts combined. Compared to the other cohorts, RCC patients from Japan were enriched for pathogenic variants in TP53 and depleted for pathogenic variants in CHEK2. The United States cohorts showed higher frequencies of patients with pathogenic variants in BAP1 and FH genes compared to other cohorts. In contrast, RCC patients from Canada and the United Kingdom were not enriched for any specific genes when compared with the other cohorts. After characterizing germline susceptibility to RCC, the authors evaluated how many of the RCC patients in the Canadian cohort did not meet existing referral criteria for genetic screening based on current clinical guidelines, aiming to help refine these guidelines. Among the 56 RCC patients with identified germline pathogenic variants in the Canadian cohort, 73% did not meet the referral criteria for genetic screening under current Canadian guidelines. The authors also applied the UK guidelines and the US American College of Medical Genetics guidelines to the same 56 RCC patients. Under these criteria, 80% and 64%, respectively, were not eligible for genetic screening. In an exploratory analysis, the authors examine the impact of raising the Asia onset threshold from less than 45 years to less than 50 years. This revision captured an additional five patients with pathogenic variants. In addition to more inclusive genetic screening guidelines, the study results suggest that expanding the current list of genes to include additional relevant genes such as BRCA1, BRCA2, CHEK2 and ATM could help identify more RCC patients who are affected by rare germline pathogenic variants in Canada. The authors concluded that these revisions would enable the identification of a higher number of at-risk patients and improve the management of RCC patients. In the associated editorial accompanying this research article, Dr. Salvador Jaime-Casas and colleagues emphasized that the findings from Dr. Glennon and colleagues’ study are particularly worrisome as most RCC patients with incidental pathogenic variants are not being referred for genetic screening. Building on results from previous studies, the authors suggested the need to revisit and update the current screening guidelines for RCC patients. The authors also highlighted findings from other studies showing the prevalence of pathogenic variants in CHECK2, BRCA1, and BRCA2 at up to 6% in RCC patients and 11% in upper tract urothelial carcinoma patients. They noted that these rates are comparable to those of ovarian cancer and pancreatic cancer, which already have universal screening guidelines. The authors also discuss some challenges. While the prevalence of pathogenic variants is crucial for evaluating the impact of germline genetic testing, it's only one factor in devising screening guidelines for RCC and urothelial carcinoma. They emphasize the need for robust clinical trials to evaluate therapeutics targeting these pathways, as well as the importance of characterizing incidental pathogenic variants to guide patient selection for these trials. Thank you for listening to JCO Precision Oncology Article Insights and please tune in for the next topic. Don't forget to give us a rating or review and be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. You can find all ASCO shows at asco.org/podcasts.   The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions. Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience and conclusions. Guest statements on the podcast do not express the opinions of ASCO. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity, or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement.

JCO PO author Dr. Michael J. Hall, Professor of Medicine, Chairman of the Department of Clinical Genetics, and Co-Leader of the Cancer Prevention and Control Program at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, PA, shares insights into the JCO PO article, “Uptake of Aspirin Chemoprevention in Patients with Lynch Syndrome.” Host Dr. Rafeh Naqash and Dr. Hall discuss the finding that only about 1 in 3 patients with Lynch Syndrome use aspirin for cancer chemoprevention. TRANSCRIPT  Dr. Rafeh Naqash: Hello and welcome to JCO Precision Oncology Conversations, where we bring you engaging conversations with authors of clinically relevant and highly significant JCO PO articles. I'm your host, Dr. Rafeh Naqash podcast editor for JCO Precision Oncology and Assistant Professor at the OU Health Stephenson Cancer Center at the University of Oklahoma. Today, I'm excited to be joined by Dr. Michael J. Hall, Professor of Medicine, Chairman of the Department of Clinical Genetics and co-leader of the Cancer Prevention and Control Program at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, and also the lead author of the JCO Precision Oncology article entitled, “Uptake of Aspirin Chemo Prevention in Patients with Lynch Syndrome.” At the time of this recording, our guest disclosures will be linked in the transcript. Dr. Hall, welcome to the podcast and thank you for joining us today to explain and help the listeners understand your interesting research that was just published in JCO Precision Oncology. Dr. Michael J. Hall: Thank you so much for having me and really thanks for the interest in our work. I think it's an important subject and I hope people will also find it as interesting as we do. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: Absolutely. I think your research touches upon a few things. One, obviously, touches upon Lynch syndrome germline assessments of individuals. It also touches upon chemo prevention, prevention in general, and it also touches upon the knowledge and understanding of chemo prevention aspects. So to start off, I would like to ask you, for the sake of our listeners, many of whom who may not necessarily fully understand the length and breadth of Lynch syndrome, maybe perhaps some residents or trainees out there, could you tell us what Lynch syndrome is, what some of the mutations are, what the implications are, and then we can try to go and delve more into the research topic. Dr. Michael J. Hall: Sure, I'd be happy to. Lynch syndrome is probably, in the hereditary cancer genetics world, one of the most common hereditary risk syndromes we encounter. Recent estimates are that probably roughly about 1 in every 280 individuals in the population is a carrier of a pathogenic variant, one of the Lynch syndrome genes, there are roughly four. There's sort of a fifth gene that is also involved with Lynch syndrome, but really, we largely think about four genes in Lynch syndrome, MLH1, MSH2, MSH6, and PMS2. Over time we've begun to learn, and I'll say that the guidelines that we develop have become more specialized for each of those genes. They are not sort of all the same in the cancers they cause and the way they behave. But roughly, what is Lynch syndrome? It's a syndrome of DNA mismatch repair. So, individuals who have Lynch syndrome have some degree of deficiency in their ability to repair DNA via the mismatch repair system. Depending on the pathogenic variant that is within a family, that may be related to a more severe deficiency of mismatch repair, repair, editing, or for instance, with the PMS2 gene, we've learned over time that actually the degree of DNA repair deficiency is actually a milder phenotype. These individuals over a lifetime are at risk of a variety of different kinds of cancers, the most common being colon cancer. And the risk of that is variable by gene. With MLH1 and MSH2, it's close to 50% over a lifetime. With MSH6 and PMS2, somewhat lower. There are also risks of endometrial cancer, gastric cancer, ovarian cancer, pancreas cancer, a number of other ones. But they're all related again to the same underlying molecular deficiency, and that's this deficiency of being able to repair mistakes made in the DNA accurately. And so, mutations accumulate in the genome of cells in various tissues of the body. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: Thank you for that very simplified version of a very complicated topic otherwise. So, as you mentioned, these different genes have different implications. Perhaps some have higher risks for colorectal cancer than others. What are some of the current standardized approaches for screening or following these individuals over the course of their journey until perhaps either get detected with cancer or while they're being monitored? Dr. Michael J. Hall: Sure. It's a great question, because this is very much a moving target in this disease. I'm going to give you a quick second of history that up until maybe about six or seven years ago, we had uniform guidelines, really, that any Lynch syndrome pathogenic variant carrier should start colorectal cancer screening. Usually, we were recommending between the age of 20 and 25, and this was usually annual colonoscopy. And for years that was the standard. In more recent years, we've stuck to that tight interval, particularly in the higher risk genes, MLH1 and MSH2, although the guideline now reads every one to two years, because we recognize people need some degree of flexibility to live their lives. And there are people in the population who are more risk averse, and there are those who want a colonoscopy every year because they want to stick to that schedule. For MSH6, we recommend a somewhat later start at age 30, and that can be every one to three years for colon screening and for PMS2, similar recommendations, although I think there is a chance in the coming years, we may actually expand the screening interval even more, again, because the risks are somewhat lower. We still have ways to go in terms of screening for the other cancers in Lynch syndrome. I'll say that, for instance, endometrial cancer, which is the second most common cancer in this disease, we still struggle with what is the best way to screen women for a risk of endometrial cancer. Our guidelines in the past were always somewhat draconian, that once women sort of finish childbearing, they should immediately have a total abdominal hysterectomy and oophorectomy. And I'll say that with greater input from the gynecologic and GYN ONC community, we have somewhat softened those recommendations, especially for the endometrial cancer and also the age at oophorectomy, because we recognize that there were compensatory risks of taking the ovaries out too early in some women, risks of bone loss and cardiovascular disease. So those are the most common. For other tumors in Lynch syndrome, for instance, gastric cancer and pancreas cancer, the guidelines are still really evolving, and different groups have put out guidance for clinicians. And I'll say NCCN, which I participate in and help write those guidelines, has very good recommendations for docs. But I'll say that it is again, back to the idea that it's a moving target. And as we learn more, hopefully, we'll have better recommendations. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: I completely agree as far as a moving target is concerned, and we often look at the disconnect between the recommendations and then what's implemented or followed in the real-world setting. So I have a question in that context, and my question is, when you identify these individuals with Lynch syndrome, perhaps let's talk about academic settings, and then we can try to delve into how this might work in the real world community oncology settings, where the real world population actually exists, 60, 70% of individuals get treated in the community. So, when you talk about an academic center, what is the flow of the individual? Does the individual stay within the geneticist when they're diagnosed? Does the individual go to the primary care and the geneticist makes the recommendation and the primary care follows the recommendation? How does it work for you and what are some of the models that you've seen work best perhaps at different academic centers? Dr. Michael J. Hall: I think you get at a really great question. And I'll say there is really no one model. And I think models have to be fluid these days because people with Lynch syndrome are really being identified in more and more diverse settings, and by diverse means. I'll say at my own center, we are more of a traditional practice. So, we do the pre-test and the post-test counseling. Once we have counseled individuals identified Lynch syndrome, we will usually make referrals. If folks don't have a gastroenterologist that they have interacted with before, we keep them in our own group and follow them. But their Lynch syndrome home really sits both in a continuity clinic that I run for patients to come back and circle around every one to two years just to review guidelines and review their screening results. However, I do really make an effort to, first of all, keep primary care docs involved, because I think some of the things we recommend, it is critical that the primary care doc is aware so that patients are keeping up with some of the recommendations. For instance, we often recommend skin screening to make sure that folks have had at least one good skin exam somewhere in the 40s. And I think the primary care doc can be very helpful in making sure that happens. It is somewhat different, I think, in the community where many more patients with Lynch syndrome are being identified these days. I suspect that much more of the burden of making sure Lynch syndrome patients are well hooked in with a gastroenterologist and with a dermatologist and maybe a urologist probably does fall on that primary care doctor. In my experience, some primary care physicians have really kind of jumped up in and taken hold of this and really know their Lynch syndrome well, and I think that's amazing. I do, however, as kind of an expert in this area, I do get a lot of referrals in from the community as well, from docs who just feel that they may not have quite that expertise that they can get at a comprehensive center. So, someone may come in to me just for a consult to review what my recommendations would be, hear about research, hear about what's going on in the field, and those folks will often touch base with me again every couple year or so. Often, another thing I've started to experience is that I may meet people once or twice early on in their diagnosis, and then they go back to their primary docs and I may not hear from them again until something more profound happens in the family or into the patient and they get their screening colonoscopy and a stage 1 cancer is found. Often then, that's the patient who, after four or five years, will contact me again and say, “We haven't talked in a while, but something has happened, and can we re-consult about what would be the best way to do things?” Dr. Rafeh Naqash: Again, like you said, lots of moving targets, moving aspects to this whole care of these individuals. Do you think, in your experience, nurse navigation, maybe some centers have already implemented that perhaps you might have that, do you think nurse navigation could play a certain level of role? You know how in the multidiscipline care we have nurse navigators that coordinate care between radiation oncologists, medical oncologists, thoracic surgeons. So that's something that is being implemented. My second part of that question is telehealth in this case, maybe it's a little more difficult for somebody to drive three hours to come to you for a visit just to check in versus maybe virtually talking to you or your team getting a sense of where things are at in terms of their screening and their follow ups. Dr. Michael J. Hall: I think both are great, great questions and absolutely, we use both of those pieces in our model. And I know from colleagues that they do as well. So, in terms of navigation, we do have an embedded nurse navigator within our department. She joins and kind of helps facilitate all of our high risk follow up clinics. Mine, for GI, we have a high-risk prostate clinic, we have several high-risk breast clinics and those are populated by providers. We have a couple of nurse practitioners in my genetics group and a PA they are sort of the main provider in those clinics, but they are very much supported by that nurse navigator who, as you well point out, really helps with the coordination of the care. Telehealth as well, I do 100% support because you're absolutely right, if you look at a map of the United States and you first of all look at where there are good counseling services available, of course, there's ample counseling in the major metropolitan areas all over the U.S., but the minute you get outside of those counseling and then other management expertise, then– So we do have a model where particularly for folks who are from central Pennsylvania and sometimes more towards western Pennsylvania, I do have some individuals who've been identified with Lynch syndrome who telehealth in, again, for that follow up. A sort of side notes on telehealth, I think we learned a lot from the pandemic about how to use telehealth more effectively. And thank goodness, we've all gotten up to speed in medicine of how to be better telehealth providers. Unfortunately, I feel like with the pandemic kind of waning, there's been a little bit of a regression of the telehealth laws. So now if I want to do telehealth with someone who is from New Jersey, even though New Jersey sits very close to where I practice, it's more complicated now. Again, I have to get a license and same thing with New York and same thing with Delaware. I sort of wish we had a little bit of a better and welcoming system in the states where you could have easier ability to practice, especially when states were quite close using telehealth. But nonetheless, that's for another podcast, I think. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: Well, thank you again for some of those interesting aspects to this whole topic. But let's dive into the thing that we are here to talk about, which is aspirin in these individuals. So can you give us some context of why aspirin, what's the biology there and what's the data there, and then talk about why you did what you did. Dr. Michael J. Hall: So, we've known for many years that aspirin has preventive properties in terms of preventing colorectal cancer. Many observational studies and some interventional studies have shown us that aspirin has benefits for reducing the risk of colon cancer in an average risk population. There was even an interventional trial a number of years ago that looked at individuals who made polyps, and this looked at particularly adenomas, which we know are the precancerous polyps and adenoma prevention using aspirin. And that study clearly showed that aspirin had benefits for lowering risk of recurrent polyps and adenomas. Particularly even a lower dose of aspirin, 81 milligrams, was effective in that setting. Aspirin's also been studied in other hereditary risk syndromes, the most visible one being FAP, where data have shown that aspirin does help reduce polyp count in FAP, although is certainly not a perfect chemo prevention for that disease. So, in that background of knowing that aspirin has many benefits for colorectal cancer prevention, a study was initiated in the UK a number of years ago called the CAPP2 study, with its lead investigator being John Burn. And in this study, it was a two-arm factorial study that was not just aspirin, but they were also looking at resistant starch, which there was a lot of excitement about resistant starch back then. But in this study, they looked at using aspirin as a way of lowering risk of colorectal cancer in patients with Lynch syndrome. And that study, which was initially reported in The New England Journal, the initial outcomes did not actually show benefits in its first analyses of adenoma risk and colon cancer risk. But what they found over time was that there was a delayed effect and, in a follow, up paper looking at 10 plus years of follow up, they showed a substantial reduction in risk of colon cancer, about 40% risk reduction, which was really striking and exciting in the field to see such a large benefit from aspirin. Now, one caveat was in the analyses they performed, it was those individuals who were able to stick to the aspirin dose in that study, which was 600 milligrams a day. I always say to folks that back in the day, that was not a lot of aspirin, although I think these days we're much more skeptical about taking larger doses of any drug. So, 600 milligrams is roughly about two adult aspirin in the U.S. So those folks who were able to stick to that dose for at least two years were the ones who gained benefit from being on aspirin. And what was interesting is that benefit endured for really 10 years after those two years of being able to take aspirin. So, this was striking and it really changed our thinking about whether there may be chemo prevention options for folks with Lynch syndrome. However, and I think what formed the background of our study here was that there was a somewhat equivocal endorsement of aspirin by the major guidelines committees, mainly because, as we all know in oncology, we love one first big study, but we always really love secondary studies that solidify the finding of the first study. And so, because this was such a niche group and no one else out there was doing big aspirin studies when this result came out in 2011, we've sort of been waiting for many years for some follow up data. And the NCCN guidelines have always been a little bit equivocal that people could consider using aspirin to lower risk in their patients with Lynch syndrome, but without that kind of strong, “Everyone should do this.” And so, this has kind of formed the background of why we performed the study that we did. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: Interesting. And then you had a bunch of observations. One of the most important ones being that use of aspirin was pretty low. Could you dive into that and help us understand what were some of the factors surrounding those low implementation aspects? Dr. Michael J. Hall: Of course. So, what we were interested in then again in that background was, here's a high-risk population, docs are getting somewhat maybe ambiguous information from the guidelines, but what actually is going on out there in practice? How many patients are actually using aspirin? What doses are they using, and what are some of the factors that drive it? So, we performed a survey that actually occurred in two parts. One started at Fox Chase in our population here, and then we expanded it online to a convenience sample. Overall, we had 296 respondents. And yeah, what we found actually was the uptake of aspirin was only about roughly 30%, 35% or so among patients who were eligible to take aspirin. When you actually drill down to those people actually taking aspirin because they wanted to prevent Lynch syndrome, it was even lower. It was in the range of 25% to 30%. This somewhat surprised us. And then when we looked at the doses that people were using, of course, thinking back to that 600-milligram dose that was tested in the study, we found actually that more than half of folks were taking low dose aspirin, like an 81 milligram, and only about 8% of our study participants were using that 600-milligram range. So, again, I would say this somewhat surprised us because we thought it might be higher than this. I'll say as a somewhat caveat to this though, is that back to my comment about we always like another study that confirms our findings, and at a meeting earlier this year, there was a study performed in a New Zealand population by a medical oncologist named Rebecca Tuckey. And she actually found almost the same identical results that we did in the New Zealand population - very, very similar uptake rates of aspirin in the New Zealand population with Lynch syndrome, so kind of confirming that something we've stumbled upon appears to be true. But how do we understand why some folks use aspirin and why others don't in this condition? Dr. Rafeh Naqash: You had a very robust question there from what I saw in the paper. And some of the questions that I had around that was, did you or were you able to account for demographics, education level of the individuals? Were you also able to assess whether these individuals felt that they had been counseled appropriately when they met with either a primary care physician or of any provider on the genetic side, physician or non-physician? So how did you get an assessment of whether it was an apples-to-apples comparison or were there a lot of confounders. Dr. Michael J. Hall: Very good question. And of course, in the setting, unfortunately, we weren't interviewing people, which we could have gotten much richer data in some ways. And there were other things we were looking at in this survey as well, so our aspirin questions, we had a number of them, but perhaps in retrospect, it would have been nice to even have more. We did have some common covariates, age, sex, ancestry, marital status, which gene was affected, whether they had a history of cancer. We did not have education, unfortunately. And I think your question is a great one, but we did not actually ask folks about whether they had been counseled by their provider or their genetic counselor or someone else about whether they should use aspirin or not. We simply wanted to see whether folks were using it. We did ask them again whether they were using it because they wanted to lower their risk of a Lynch syndrome cancer or whether they were using it for another reason or a combination of both. So, yes, in retrospect, we actually do have another study plan to kind of drill deeper into these questions of is it more of a hesitancy question? Is it more of a question of just not as much awareness? Are there other reasons? I think there's a lot to answer, and I think answering these questions is really important because we both want to make sure we're talking about interventions that we think can help people, but we need to understand also some of the barriers they may face. And if people do have barriers to some forms of chemo prevention or I think about some of the vaccine research that's going on right now, if the kinds of things that we're working on to develop are actually not going to be palatable to the patient, the population, then I think we kind of need to step back and say we need to maybe understand what people want so that we can have a good meeting of what's going to work and what's going to fit the needs and lifestyles of our patients. Because these are things they might have to do for many, many years and starting maybe even in their 20s or 30s. So, it makes a difference. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: From what you learned in the study, are you thinking of any subsequent interventional approaches, whether they involve a simple phone call to the patient regularly or perhaps, even though I'm not a big fan of EMR prompts, like an EMR prompt of some sort, where they talk, where they're instructing the provider, whoever is seeing the patient physician or the APP or the geneticist that, “Hey. Did you counsel the patient?” And its sort of a metric how in the oncology side they say, “Well, your metric is you should stage all patients and you should talk about toxicities from a reimbursement standpoint and also from a quality improvement metric standpoint. “Is that something you're thinking of? Dr. Michael J. Hall: 100%. So, when we looked at the barriers, many of the kind of the things that were the strongest predictors of who used aspirin versus who didn't were really patients’ perceptions of whether aspirin would cause side effects or whether aspirin would be burdensome to take on a daily basis, also, just how much benefit they thought would come from taking aspirin. So, I think there's, number one, I think an intervention and our next delve into this as an interventional study would be both education about the delta prevention benefit that you get from aspirin, the safety profile of aspirin, which is really quite excellent. And also, I think the data that are so important that in this study by Burn et al, it was actually only two years of intervention that then paid off for 10 years down the line, right? So, I think that's important. The other thing that we actually learned as an aside in this study was actually the kind of intervention that patients wanted the most was actually not a drug and was not a vaccine and was not another kind of special scope to stick somewhere. What they actually were most interested in were interventions related to diet. People really see diet as being an important part of health, or I should say diet and nutrition. And so, I think a subsequent study would perhaps wed both a nutritional intervention of some kind with a chemo prevention in some sort of time limited fashion, so that folks felt like they were both focusing on something that was more important to them, but also, something that was related to the study that we wanted to look at. So that's kind of my idea of where we're going to go in the future with this. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: Excellent. Sounds like the next big RO1 for your group. Dr. Michael J. Hall: Let's hope so. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: Well, I hope the listeners enjoyed talking about the science and learning about aspirin Lynch syndrome. The last couple of minutes are about you as an individual, as an investigator. Can you tell us what your career journey has been like, how you ended up doing what you're doing, and perhaps some advice for early career junior investigators on what this whole space looks like and how you pace yourself and how they can learn from you? Dr. Michael J. Hall: I really got interested in oncology during my residency training. I really found that I really liked oncologists. I found them to be a bit more of a science focused group. They liked research, but you're in oncology because you understand the fears and the challenges of cancer. And so, it's both a combination of that love of science, but also that real human touch of taking care of people. The thing I always tell my fellows as well is the other thing I love about oncology is if you tell people they don't have cancer, they don't want to come back to you. Now, of course, that's modified in the prevention setting. But I really like that when people come to me in my GI oncology clinic, it's because they have a diagnosis and if I say you actually don't have cancer, they go off to their life, and so you're really spending your time on real subjects. The person who really got me most interested in Lynch syndrome and this kind of prevention research was a mentor from University of Chicago, Funmi Olopade, who really has been an enormous mentor for many, many people in the field. Actually, three people in my fellowship class all went on to careers related to genetics and genomics. So, she's been highly influential and continues to mentor me even in my mid-career. I think in terms of pearls or what keeps this interesting for me, I think as much as oncology treatment and new drugs and trials is super exciting, I love being able to step away from that into my genetics and prevention population and kind of focus on treating people in a different format. Patients who are healthy but are worried about cancer because of a family history or carrying a gene or otherwise, and I feel that that's where I can have also an important impact, but on a different level in educating people and helping them understand how genetics works in an understandable and simple way, but also giving them some tools. And one reason for this study, and the reason I study preferences related to prevention is, again, I don't want to just develop something and spend 10, 15 years of my life developing some intervention that everyone looks at and is like, “I don't really want to do that.” I want to really understand what it is that is important to the patients so that we can hopefully work together to develop things that can not only have impact but have impact on a wide scale. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: Awesome. You mentioned Dr. Olopade. I crossed paths with her actually at an international medical graduate community of practice session earlier this year at ASCO where she talked about her journey as an immigrant, talked about how she started, the kind of impact that she's had. It was obvious evident in the picture that she showed with all her mentees who have kind of gone all over the world. So that was very phenomenal. And it's surprising how small of a world we live in. Everybody knows everybody else. Dr. Michael J. Hall: It's crazy. More so than anyone I think I've met in my career; she is really a huge believer in mentorship and spending that extra time with your mentees. And she has been someone who has continued to promote me as an investigator and build me up and get me involved in things. And like I said, I've been in oncology now for quite a few years. But having that person who I think is always thinking about their trainees and people who have learned and grown under them, because what it does is it gives you that fire as well as an investigator to do the same thing for the people that you are a mentor for and train. So, I try to be just as good of a mentor to my genetic counselors and the fellows who come through me and my APPs to give them opportunities to get them excited about research and when they have these big moments to do that. So, yeah, I know Funmi just has had a huge impact on the field of genetics. I still remember some of our early conversations on the wards when she said to me, “Oh, this is such an interesting case. We don't really have anyone who's studying Lynch syndrome so much right now and you should really get into this area.” And I remember thinking, “Okay, I want to develop a niche and here's a niche that's waiting.” Dr. Rafeh Naqash: Clearly it paid off big time and you're paying it forward with your mentees. So, thank you again for joining us. This was an absolute pleasure. Hopefully, the listeners learned a lot about the science and also your journey and how you're trying to impact the field. Thank you for listening to JCO Precision Oncology Conversations. Don't forget to give us a rating or review and be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. You can find all ASCO shows at asco.org/podcasts   The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions. Guests on this podcast express their own opinion, experience and conclusions. Guest statements on the podcast do not express the opinions of ASCO. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement.      

In this JCO Precision Oncology Article Insights episode, Mitchell Elliot summarizes the article “Talazoparib in Patients With Solid Tumors With BRCA1/2 Mutation: Results From the Targeted Agent and Profiling Utilization Registry Study” by Dr. Jordan Srkalovic et al.  published on June 12th, 2024. TRANSCRIPT Mitchell Elliott: Hello, welcome to JCO Precision Oncology Article Insights. I'm your host Mitchell Elliott, an ASCO Journals Editorial Fellow. Today I'll be providing a summary of the article titled, “Talazoparib in Patients With Solid Tumors With BRCA1/ 2 Mutation: Results From the Targeted Agent and Profiling Utilization Registry Study,” by Dr. Jordan Srkalovic et al. The Targeted Agent and Profiling Utilization Registry Study is a phase 2 basket trial evaluating the anti-tumor activity of commercially available targeted agents in patients with advanced cancer and genomic alterations known to be drug targets. Results of a cohort of patients with various solid tumors with germline or somatic BRCA1 and 2 mutations treated with talazoparib are reported. BRCA1 is involved in both non homologous end joining, and homologous recombination, while BRCA2 primarily facilitates homologous recombination. These mutations are present in a range of cancers including breast, ovarian and pancreatic cancers, making them key targets for therapies that inhibit poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase or PARP, a family of proteins critical for DNA repair. PARP inhibitors like talazoparib have shown promise in treating cancers with BRCA mutations as they prevent tumors from repairing DNA damage, thus promoting cell death. Many PARP inhibitors are standard of care in both early and advanced cancers. Talazoparib was previously FDA approved for BRCA related HER2 negative breast cancer and prostate cancer. The TAPUR study aims to investigate the effectiveness of talazoparib and other types of solid tumors with BRCA1 and 2 mutations to expand its potential therapeutic applications. Eligible patients had to meet both general and drug specific criteria for inclusion in the study. General eligibility required participants to have advanced or metastatic solid tumors measurable by the RECIST version 1.1 criteria, a performance status of 0 to 2 based on the Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group Scale, and a genomic target identified through certified laboratory testing. Patients with germline or somatic BRCA1 or 2 mutations were eligible, but the genomic test did not always differentiate between these types of mutations. Additional criteria included being age 18 years or older, using effective contraception and avoiding sperm donation at the set period. Exclusion criteria included patients with HER2 negative breast cancer, prior PARP inhibitor treatments, or certain cardiovascular conditions. The study also excluded patients with recent major surgeries, coagulopathy and serious medical conditions, but there were no criteria related to prior platinum therapies. Patients received 1 milligram of talazoparib daily until disease progression, unacceptable toxicity, or other reasons for discontinuation. The primary endpoint of the study was disease control which was defined by achieving either objective response or stable disease lasting at least 16 weeks as assessed by the RECIST criteria. Secondary endpoints included objective response, progression free survival, overall survival, duration of response, duration of stable disease, and safety. The study enrolled 28 eligible patients with 20 different solid tumors that had BRCA1/2 alterations between December 2019 and September 2021 across 19 clinical sites with most patients, about 89%, enrolled from community-based locations in the United States. The most common tumor type was non-small cell lung cancer accounting for 18% of cases. All patients were included in both the safety and efficacy analyses including three with HER2 negative breast cancer and somatic BRCA alterations. Of the 28 patients, nine had tumors with BRCA1 alterations, 16 had BRCA2 alterations and three had both BRCA1 and BRCA2 alterations. Additionally, 64% of patients had tumors with coalterations and at least one DNA damage repair gene. In the study, one patient achieved a complete response, nine patients had partial response and six patients had stable disease for at least 16 weeks. The overall disease control rate was 57% with an objective response of 36%. The study rejected the null hypothesis of a 15% disease control rate with high statistical significance with a p-value of less than 0.001. The median progression free survival was 24 weeks and median overall survival was 71 weeks. Interestingly, among the 19 patients who received prior platinum-based chemotherapy, 5, or about 26%, had a partial response and 4 had stable disease while on talazoparib. While platinum therapy exposure can be associated with BRCA reversion mutations, it is notable that these patients achieve stable disease with PARP inhibitor treatment. 46% of the 28 patients experienced grade 3 - 5 adverse events or serious adverse events that were possibly related to talazoparib. 14% of patients had possible drug related serious adverse events which included conditions such as anemia, neutropenia, leukopenia, nausea and vomiting. More severe grade 4 or 5 events included anemia, neutropenia, thrombocytopenia, leukopenia, hyponatremia, and increased level of the aspartate aminotransferase and bilirubin. In conclusion, this study demonstrates that talazoparib shows significant antitumor activity in patients with advanced solid tumors carrying both BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations, even in cancers beyond those for which PARP inhibitors are currently FDA approved. The disease control and objective response rates indicate promising results in heavily pretreated patients who have no standard treatment options left. The findings suggest that PARP inhibitors like telazoparib could be effective in a broad range of cancers, including non-small cell lung cancer, mesothelioma and hepatocellular carcinoma where PARP inhibitors are not yet approved. This could pave the way for expanding the use of these drugs in precision oncology. While talazoparib showed efficacy, the study also reported a notable incidence of grade 3 to 5 adverse events, highlighting the need for careful management of side effects, particularly in heavily pretreated patients. The study calls for further research, particularly in randomized controlled trials to confirm the efficacy of talazoparib in other cancers beyond what is currently approved. It also suggests investigating the effect of DNA damage repair gene alterations and exploring combinations of PARP inhibitors with other targeted therapies. Additionally, further studies are needed to understand the potential differences in response between BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations. Thank you for listening to JCO Precision Oncology Article Insights and please tune into the next topic. Don't forget to give us a rating and review and be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. You can find all ASCO shows at www.asco.org/podcasts. The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions. Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience and conclusions. Guest statements on the podcast do not express the opinions of ASCO. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement.      

JCO PO author Dr. Amar U. Kishan, Professor, Executive Vice Chair, and Chief of Genitourinary Oncology Service in the Department of Radiation Oncology at the University of California, Los Angeles, shares insights into his JCO PO article, “Transcriptomic Profiling of Primary Prostate Cancers and Nonlocalized Disease on Prostate-Specific Membrane Antigen Positron Emission Tomography/Computed Tomography: A Multicenter Retrospective Study.”  Host Dr. Rafeh Naqash and Dr. Kishan discuss the relationship between Decipher genomic classifier scores and prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA) PET/CT-based metastatic spread. TRANSCRIPT Dr. Rafeh Naqash: Hello and welcome to JCO Precision Oncology Conversations, where we bring you engaging conversations with authors of clinically relevant and highly significant JCO articles. I'm your host, Dr. Rafeh Naqash, Assistant Professor at the OU Health Stephenson Cancer Center at the University of Oklahoma. Today we are joined by Dr. Amar Kishan, Executive Vice Chair of the Department of Radiation Oncology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, and also the corresponding and senior author of the JCO Precision Oncology article entitled, “Transcriptomic Profiling of Primary Prostate Cancers and Non Localized Disease on Prostate-Specific Membrane Antigen (PSMA) Positron Emission Tomography/Computed Tomography: A Multicenter Retrospective Study.” Dr. Kishan, welcome to our podcast and thank you for joining us today. Dr. Amar Kishan: Thank you so much for that kind introduction and the invitation to be here today. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: Well, it seems to me that there's a theme that people in the GU space, investigators in the GU space, are very interested in trying to understand risk predictors for prostate cancer. We had somebody, I believe from Huntsman Cancer Center a few months back on a previous podcast, where they were trying to do risk prediction modeling as well. Could you tell us why that's something that the GU community is very interested in? What's the background? Is it because there's no risk prediction approaches currently? And would this somehow influence management in the near future? Dr. Amar Kishan: Yeah, that's a great question. So, I think this goes back to the point that we're in the era of precision medicine now, and many cancers have these molecular stratification scores and all that. Prostate cancer has lagged a little bit behind in that regard, despite the fact that it's such a common cancer that affects so many people across the country and across the world. So, we do have risk stratification schemes for prostate cancer. These are based off clinical and pathologic variables, like the level of PSA, the size of the tumor on digital rectal examination, now, we're incorporating MRI imaging as well, and then what the cancer looks like under the microscope, the Gleason score. And now there have been revisions to the Gleason score, but it's really kind of the architecture, what the biopsy looks like. And this was kind of developed many, many years ago by Donald Gleason, a pathologist at the VA. What we're not necessarily taking into account routinely is kind of the biology of the cancer per se. You know, what are the molecular drivers? How could that influence ultimate outcome? And that's very important because we have these risk groups, low risk, very low risk, favorable intermediate risk, unfavorable intermediate risk, high risk, very high risk. But within each of those groups, based on the clinical kind of pathological characteristics, there's a huge heterogeneity in outpatients too, and our treatments are effective, but they can be morbid. Putting someone on hormone therapy for an extended period of time has a lot of side effects. Dose escalating radiotherapy or doing surgery and then radiation afterwards, these are big things that have a big impact on the patient, and I think we really need better risk stratification tools to understand who needs intensification and who we can de-escalate treatment for. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: I think those are absolutely valid points, perhaps not just for prostate cancer, more so for all cancers that we currently treat, especially in the current day and age, where we have a tendency to add more and more therapies, combination therapies for patients, and as you mentioned, risk stratification to help identify high risk versus low risk, where you can de intensify treatment, is of high value from a patient standpoint as well as from a financial toxicity standpoint. So then, going to this next part of the approach that you used, and from what I understand in this paper, you had the radiological aspect, which is the PSMA PET, which we'll talk about. Then you had the genomic aspect, where you did some genomic risk-based stratification. Then you had the transcriptomic score based on the Decipher score. So, could you go into some of the details, first, for the PSMA PET, when is it used? What is the utilization? What is it based on, the science behind the PSMA PET? And then we can talk about some of the other genomic transcriptomic predictors that you use in this study. Dr. Amar Kishan: Sure. Absolutely. So, a PSMA PET is an advanced molecular imaging tool. PSMA stands for prostate specific membrane antigen. It's a membrane protein that is expressed on the surface of prostate cancer cells. It is expressed elsewhere in the body as well. The utilization of this for imaging has been a revolution in the staging of prostate cancer, both upfront and in the recurrent setting. We basically had fairly recent approval for PSMA PET being used more routinely in upfront staging and recurrent staging in 2022. Essentially, what this is it gives us an ability to detect whether prostate cancer has spread at a time of diagnosis or try to localize the recurrence. Now, no imaging test is perfect, of course, and a PET has a resolution of about 3 mm. There are questions about the sensitivity of the PET. You get it on a patient with high-risk disease, the PET is negative; you do surgery, there are positive lymph nodes. That can happen, but it's far superior to the tools that we have had before. For instance, beforehand, all we would have is a contrast enhanced CT, bone scan, and MRI. And the sensitivity of those is far below that of a PSMA PET. And that has actually been shown in a randomized trial called the ProPSMA trial out of Australia, where they compared conventional upfront imaging versus PSMA upfront imaging with a crossover design, and there was better detection of disease with the PSMA PET. So that's been a revolution in how we stage prostate cancer. But I'm sure many of your listeners and others are aware of the concerns. When you get a new test and you're detecting disease that's extra prostatic, for instance, are you seeing truly significant new disease that we do need to change our management for, or are we just seeing stuff that wasn't there before that actually wouldn't impact anything? And what I mean by that is, let's say you're seeing things that would never have made a difference to the patient, but now you're saying they have metastatic disease. You're changing their entire treatment paradigm, all kinds of things like that. There's implications to this that hasn't been fully fleshed out. But very recently, like we're talking in July of 2024, essentially, there was a Lancet Oncology paper that looked at the long-term prognosis of patients who had extra prostatic disease on PSMA PET, judged by something called a PROMISE score, kind of gives a quantification on the volume of disease, the brightness of disease, and they correlated that with long term outcomes. And that was really the first time that we have long term follow up data that this extra prostatic disease on PSMA PET actually is prognostically important. So, we're getting there. I mean, now that it's approved and, in some sense, the cat is out of the bag, patients are coming in asking for a PSMA PET, etc. I'm sure everyone has experienced that, but I think we now do have good evidence that it actually is prognostically important as well. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: Thank you for that explanation. And again, to put this into context for things that I've seen and that might also help the listeners in other tumors, so, for example, melanoma surveillance tends to be or while on treatment, patients tend to have more PET scans than what you see, maybe in individuals with lung cancer, where you get a baseline PET and then you have follow up CT scan based imaging is that something that you guys have shifted from in the prostate cancer space with the approval for PSMA PET, where follow up imaging, whether patient is on treatment or surveillance imaging, is PSMA PET based? Dr. Amar Kishan: Yeah, that's a good question. I think there's actually less robust data to support it as a means of treatment response. But in terms of evaluating a recurrence, then, yes, that has become kind of a standard tool. It's very complicated because all of the metrics that we have for, say, a treatment failing are based on conventionally detected metastases or something that shows up on a CT or bone scan. So, again, that question arises if someone is on systemic therapy and then you see something on a PSMA PET, are you going to abandon the therapy that you're on? It technically would be earlier than you would otherwise have done that, or what are you going to do? So, that hasn't been fully fleshed out, but it is used in that circumstance. So, I'd say less for treatment monitoring and more for evaluation of suspected recurrence. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: Understood. And I'm guessing, as a futuristic approach, somebody out there may perhaps do a trial using PSMA PET based imaging to decide whether treatment change needs to be made or does not need to be made. Dr. Amar Kishan: Yeah. It is being incorporated into trials as we speak, I think. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: Now, going to the second part of this paper is the Decipher score. Could you explain what the score is, what its components are, how it's calculated? Is it DNA, is it RNA, is it both combined? Is it tissue based; is it blood based? Dr. Amar Kishan: Yeah. So, the Decipher is also an approved test now, was approved in 2018. What it is, essentially, and how it's derived is based on the idea originally that patients might have a recurrence after surgery for prostate cancer. And it's just a PSA recurrence. It's this way. It's literally what we call a biochemical recurrence. That patient might not have any problems, whereas other patients with a recurrence might go on to develop metastatic disease. And we didn't have a good way of determining which patient is which. Get back to that prognostic problem that we have. So, some investigators, they looked at men that had radical prostatectomy from 1987 to 2001 at the Mayo Clinic that had archived tissue. They looked at FFPE, or basically paraffin embedded tissue. They extracted the RNA and then did a microarray analysis and looked at transcriptomic signatures and wanted to see, could this discern the patients who had mets, who had clinically significant recurrences from those that didn't? And out of that exercise came the Decipher Genomic Classifier, which basically is based on 22 genes. These are involved with cell proliferation, etc., but it's an RNA-based, tissue-based assay. So, if you wanted to order a Decipher on somebody, you would need to use a biopsy or prostatectomy specimen to do so. Essentially, that the samples, they would take the highest grade, highest Gleason grade specimen, send it to their lab. Their main lab is in California. The company is called Veracyte. And then they will do this RNA express analysis with a microarray and then return a score. The score is 0 to 1. Basically, 0 is the lowest, one is the highest, and it is a way of prognosticating the risk of metastasis. Originally, when you get a Decipher report, it actually will tell you the 5 and 10-year risks of distant metastasis, and we'll quantify that. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: And you said this is approved or has been approved in 2018. So, is this insurance reimbursable at this point? Dr. Amar Kishan: Most insurances do, not all, and the criteria for getting it can vary, so we can talk about it, but it was initially developed in this post-op setting. On the basis of a significant amount of validation studies, it has been moved to being used in the upfront setting as well. So, if you look at some of the ongoing NRG trials, for instance, they are stratifying patients based off the upfront Decipher score. And this is based off of validation studies that have been conducted looking at past RTOG trials and other trials. That said, sometimes it is not approved by commercial insurances in the upfront setting, because that wasn't where it was initially validated and derived. But honestly, here in 2024, that's very uncommon. It's much more common that it's approved. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: Understood. And in your practice, or the medical oncologist practice at your institution or other institutions, is this something that is commonly used for some sort of treatment decision making that you've seen? Dr. Amar Kishan: Yeah. So, as a radiation oncologist, I do think it's a useful test, because my approach is, if we're talking about adding hormone therapy, for instance, which is oftentimes dominating the conversation, we know that it offers a relative benefit to a lot of patients. We've published on this; others have published on it. Let's say it reduces the chance of metastasis by about 40%. 10-year risk of metastasis has a ratio of 0.6. So, 40% reduction. But if your risk of metastasis is 2%, that benefit is not that much in absolute terms. And we don't historically have a great way of saying, what is your absolute risk of metastasis? And I think Decipher is one tool that does tell us that - it literally gives it on the report. Now, is that a holy grail? Is it 100% accurate? Nothing is 100% accurate. But it does give us some quantification. Then I can go back to the patient and say, yes, you will get a benefit from adding hormone therapy, but you're talking about going from 2% to 1%, and so they can decide if that's worth it to them. Conversely, it could be a situation where they really don't want hormone therapy, but it comes back that their risk of metastasis is 20%, and then there's actually a big absolute benefit. So that's how I use it as a radiation oncologist, and we would use it upfront. Now surgeons, and if I was consulting on a post operative patient, maybe it plays more of a role. And do we need to do post operative radiotherapy on this patient, or do we need to add hormone therapy in the postoperative situation? From the medical oncology perspective, there are emerging data that may be useful in the choice of systemic therapy for metastatic disease, but that is a little bit earlier in the investigational stage, I would say. So, when I'm working with medical oncologists, it's often still in this localized setting, and typically, do we add hormone therapy or not, and that type of thing. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: Understood. And from a reporting standpoint, so the Decipher score, I'm guessing it's some sort of a report that comes back to the ordering physician and you basically see the score, it gives you a potential recurrence free survival percentage or a metastasis percentage of what is your risk for having metastasis in the next five years - is that how they generally do it? Because I've personally never seen one, so I'm just curious. Dr. Amar Kishan: Yeah, essentially, it comes back with a score, a numerical score, again, from 0 to 1, and it will basically give you the five-year risk of distant metastasis. The ten-year risk of distant metastasis. You can request an extended report that provides additional, not as well supported signatures that are out there, like ADT response signature, etc. But those maybe may have been published, but are not clinically validated as much, but the actual Decipher report, which goes to patients too, just has this kind of 5,10-year risk of distant metastasis. They have some estimations on prostate cancer specific mortality as well. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: Sure. Now, the third part of this project, and correct me if I'm wrong, the grid database of the 265 genomic signature score. From what I understood, this is a different component than the Decipher score. Is that a fair statement? Dr. Amar Kishan: Yeah. No, that's exactly correct. And that was an exploratory part of this analysis, to be honest. Basically, I think our main focus in the paper was those advances that we've talked about PSMA and Decipher, those happened concurrently. People started developing PSMA PET, people started developing Decipher. And so, what we wanted to understand was, if you have a patient that has extra prosthetic disease on PSMA PET, are those biologically more aggressive cancers, is their Decipher score going to be higher? What can we learn about the biology of this? And we were the first, to my knowledge, where we actually had a large data set of patients that actually received PSMA PETs and Decipher. And that's kind of the gist of the paper. We have patients in the upfront setting, patients in the post radical prostatectomy setting, and we're essentially showing that there is this correlation. In the upfront setting, the odds of extra prosthetic disease are higher for higher Decipher scores, which is kind of maybe validating that this biology is capturing something that's akin to this ability to spread. And in the post-op setting, because we have time to failure, technically, we can calculate a hazard ratio rather than odds ratio. So, we have a hazard ratio that's significantly associated with an increased risk of spread for patients with higher Decipher. The grid portion, which is the genomic resource information database, was more of an exploratory part where I mentioned the Decipher score is based off this microarray, they're looking at 1.4 million transcripts. Only 22 are part of the Decipher, but you can request the rest of the signature data as well. And so, we wanted to look at other pathways, other signatures that have been published, like looking at DNA repair, neuroendocrine pathway, just to see if we could see any correlations there that's not necessarily as clinically actionable. These are more exploratory. But again, we were trying to just look at whether patients who had non localized disease on their PSMA PET, whether their primary had more aggressive biology. We did see that. So that's kind of loosely speaking things like PTEN loss, androgen receptor, DNA repair, metabolism, neuroendocrine signaling, which are thought to be portenders of aggressive disease. Those pathways were upregulated at the RNA level in patients who had non-localized disease. And that's kind of the take home from that. But I wouldn't say any of that is clinically actionable at this point. It's more kind of defining biology. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: Some of the interesting correlations that you make here, at least in the figures that we see, you're looking at different local occurrences, nodal metastases, M1A and M1B disease. And one thing that I'm a little curious about is the Decipher score seems to be lower in pelvic nodal metastasis, that is, PSMA PET positive versus local recurrence, which has a slightly higher Decipher score. Is that just because of a sample size difference, or is there a biologically different explanation for that? Dr. Amar Kishan: Yeah, that's a good point. I would assume that's probably because of a sample size in this case, and it's a little bit complicated. It wasn't statistically different. And it was 0.76 on average for patients with local recurrence and 0.7 for patients with a pelvic nodal metastasis. Well, what I think is interesting is we can maybe think that in this post-op setting the time to failure could have been long in some of these cases. So, it is conceivable that an isolated nodal recurrence 10 years after the surgery, for instance, is not as aggressive a cancer as a local recurrence in a short time after the surgery. And that's not taken into account when you're just looking at median scores like we are in this fox and whiskers plot. But overall, I think what it's suggesting is that there are patients who have more indolent disease. That's actually pretty widespread there. There are pretty indolent cases that have these nodal metastases. So just because you have a nodal metastasis doesn't mean it's an incredibly aggressive cancer, biologically. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: Now, the exploratory component, as you mentioned, is the grid part where you do look at TP53, which is a cell cycle gene, and higher TP53 associated with worse recurrences, from what I understand. Do you see that just from a cell cycle standpoint? Because from what I, again, see in the paper, there's a couple of other cell cycle related signatures that you're using. Is that just a surrogate for potential Gleason score? Have you guys done any correlations where higher Gleason score is associated with maybe higher cell cycle checkpoint, pathway related alterations and replication stress and DNA damage and perhaps more aggressive cancers? Dr. Amar Kishan: Yeah, that's a great question. We haven't done that in this paper, but it has been published before that there is this correlation loosely between grade and some of these parameters - so repair, metabolism, androgen receptor signaling. However, it's a very great point that you bring up, which is that it's pretty heterogeneous and that's why we need something like this as opposed to Gleason score. So, you can have Gleason 10 cancer. I mean, that would be pretty uncommon. But within the Gleason 9, at least, which we have published on and looked at, there's a heterogeneity. There are some that are biologically not that aggressive. And the converse Gleason 7, you can have some that are actually biologically aggressive. That's why it may be useful to move away from just the pathological architecture and get a little bit more into some of these pathways. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: What's the next step here? I know this perhaps isn't ready for primetime. How would you try to emphasize the message in a way that makes it interesting and clinically applicable for your colleagues in the GU community? Dr. Amar Kishan: Yeah. I think for me, what I would try to emphasize here and what I think is the main takeaway is this is kind of a validation that having extra prostatic disease on PSMA PET is likely suggestive of a more aggressive disease biology. And I think what this stresses to me is the importance of getting a PSMA PET, particularly in patients with high-risk prostate cancer. This isn't always happening. And I think if we see things on a PSMA PET, we really need to consider systemic therapy intensification. And what do I mean by that as a practical point? You have a high-risk prostate cancer patient. You get a PSMA PET, you see an isolated pelvic lymph node. If we believe the results of the study, that's a more aggressive biology likely. Whether we have the Decipher or whether we have genomic signatures, which we may or may not have, maybe that patient should get treated with something like an androgen receptor signaling inhibitor in addition to ADT, more akin to a clinically node positive case. So, intensify the systemic therapy, more aggressive disease. That's how I would incorporate it practically into my practice, that really what we're seeing on the PSMA PET is real. It's a reflection of biology that's aggressive. It's not just some Will Rogers effect where you're upstaging stuff needlessly. I think this is telling us some true biology. So that's kind of what my takeaway would be. I think future areas of investigation would be, honestly, to try to have a better idea of what's going on in these metastases. So, if you could design a study potentially, where your biopsy some of these and actually do sequencing and understand a little bit more of that. And so, we're looking into stuff like that. But my takeaway for like the everyday clinician would be to try to get a PSMA PET, if you can, and to intensify therapy on the basis of that, or at least consider it, discuss it in a multidisciplinary setting. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: And I'm guessing somebody out there, perhaps even you, are thinking or planning on doing a ctDNA MRD based correlation here, since that's up and coming in this space. Dr. Amar Kishan: That is up and coming, I think one of the challenges in prostate cancer is the amount of ctDNA can be low. But yes, you're right, that's certainly things that a lot of us are looking at, too. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: Excellent. Well, thank you for the science discussion, Dr. Kishan, could you tell us a little bit about yourself, your career trajectory, where you started, what you're doing, and perhaps some advice for early career junior investigators, trainees, things that might have worked for you, that could also work for them as they are progressing in their careers. Dr. Amar Kishan: Sure. So, yeah, I'm a radiation oncologist at UCLA. I run the prostate cancer radiation program. Clinically. I'm also heavily involved in our research enterprise, so I kind of oversee the clinical and translational research aspect. That's what I do currently. So, I did my residency in radiation oncology at UCLA. Just on a personal note, my wife is from LA, her parents live in LA. We really wanted to stay in LA, so I was fortunate to be able to join the faculty here. I always liked GU oncology, so that was kind of a natural thing for me to kind of go into this position here and try to build the GU program. I've been very fortunate to have great collaborators. My message to students and trainees is to try to reach outside your department for mentorship as well. It's important to have people inside your department who can mentor you. But as a radiation oncologist, I work so closely with urology, so closely with medical oncology that I'm very fortunate to have individuals in those departments who have a vested interest in me and my success as well. I like working with them. It's important to be a team player. If they need help, you help them. If you need help, you ask for help from them. So, I think that's the single biggest thing that I would say to any trainee is don't be intimidated. Please reach outside of your department. Lots of people are willing to help and provide mentorship, and it's helpful to have that perspective. We are in a very multidisciplinary environment and era of practicing medicine. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: Well, thank you again for those personal insights and especially for submitting your work to JCO PO. And we hope to see more of this work perhaps in the subsequent sessions for JCO PO, and maybe we'll bring you back again. And at that point, the Decipher and the PSMA PET scan will have more data, more implementation in the clinically relevant real-world setting. Dr. Amar Kishan: Thank you very much. And if I could just give one quick shout out. The first author of this work, which I presented, was Dr. John Nikitas, who is a trainee that works with me here at UCLA a PGY5 resident. So, I do want to give credit to him as well. Dr. Rafeh Naqash: And John, if you're listening to this hopefully, it's always great to get a shout out from your mentor. Thank you both again for putting in the work and effort to submit this manuscript. Thank you for listening to JCO Precision Oncology Conversations. Don't forget to give us a rating or review and be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. You can find all ASCO shows at asco.org/podcasts.   The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions. Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience, and conclusions. Guest statements on the podcast do not express the opinions of ASCO. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity, or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement.    Disclosures  Dr. Kishan Honoraria Company: Varian Medical Systems, Boston Scientific,  Janssen Oncology  Consulting or Advisory Role Company: Janssen, Boston Scientific, Lantheus  Research Funding Company: Janssen , Point Biopharma