Back
September 06, 2022
Gal Dinstag, Eldad D. Shulman, Efrat Elis, Doreen S. Ben-Zvi, Omer Tirosh, Eden Maimon, Isaac Meilijson, Emmanuel Elalouf, Boris Temkin, Philipp Vitkovsky, Eyal Schiff, Danh-Tai Hoang, Sanju Sinha, Nishanth Ulhas Nair, Joo Sang Lee, Alejandro A. Schäffer, Ze’ev Ronai, Dejan Juric, Andrea B. Apolo, William L. Dahut, Stanley Lipkowitz, Raanan Berger, Razelle Kurzrock, Antonios Papanicolau-Sengos, Fatima Karzai, Mark R. Gilbert, Kenneth Aldape, Padma S. Rajagopal, Tuvik Beker, Eytan Ruppin, Ranit Aharonov
Precision oncology is gradually advancing into mainstream clinical practice, demonstrating significant survival benefits. However, eligibility and response rates remain limited in many cases, calling for better predictive biomarkers. Here we present ENLIGHT, a transcriptomics-based computational approach that identifies clinically relevant genetic interactions and uses them to predict a patient’s response to a variety of therapies in multiple cancer types, without training on previous treatment response data. We study ENLIGHT in two translationally oriented scenarios: Personalized Oncology (PO), aimed at prioritizing treatments for a single patient, and Clinical Trial Design (CTD), selecting the most likely responders in a patient cohort. Evaluating ENLIGHT’s performance on 21 blinded clinical trial datasets in the PO setting, we show that it can effectively predict a patient’s treatment response across multiple therapies and cancer types (obtaining an aggregate odds ratio of 2.59). Its prediction accuracy is better than previously published transcriptomics-based signatures and is comparable to that of supervised predictors developed for specific indications and drugs, without requiring specific response data for training. In combination with the IFN-γ signature, ENLIGHT achieves an odds ratio larger than 4 in predicting patients’ response to immune checkpoint therapy. In the CTD scenario, we demonstrate that ENLIGHT can potentially enhance clinical trial success for immunotherapies and other monoclonal antibodies (mAb) by excluding non-responders, while overall achieving more than 90% of the response rate attainable under an optimal exclusion strategy. In sum, in this retrospective study, ENLIGHT demonstrably enhances the ability to predict therapeutic response across multiple cancer types from the bulk tumor transcriptome.