Dr.  Qi  Liu
Vanderbilt University Medical Center,  USA

Title: A Pan-cancer immunogenomic portal to model immunotherapy response

Abstract:

Immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) treatments only benefit a small fraction of patients with advanced-stage cancers. Although there are an increasing number of studies on cancer immunotherapy, which have generated huge amount of omics data and provided an unprecedented opportunity to identify response-related genomic signatures, those valuable datasets are not easily accessible to the research community. We developed Cancer-Immu (http://bioinfo.vanderbilt.edu/database/Cancer-Immu/), a comprehensive portal that connects large-scale multi-omics data with ICI response. Currently Cancer-Immu has collected 3,652 patients across 16 cancer types, which provides a great resource for the discovery and validation of novel signatures predictive of response. The largest meta-analysis identified known and novel robust signatures associated with ICI response, including tumor mutational burden, IFNG and PD- 1 expression, M1 macrophages baseline levels, and T cells activation and migration. Single-cell RNA sequencing and dynamic transcriptomic changes further demonstrated enhanced circuits between macrophages and T cells contributing to ICI response. A multivariable model based on eight non-redundant robust signatures significantly outperformed predictions based on tumor mutational burden alone in three independent validation cohorts.

Biography: