TCR Repertoire Diversity of Peripheral PD-1+CD8+ T Cells Predicts Clinical Outcomes after Immunotherapy in Patients with Non–Small Cell Lung Cancer

Abstract

T-cell receptor (TCR)-based biomarkers might predict patient response to immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) but need further exploration and validation for that use. We sequenced complementarity-determining region 3 of TCRβ chains isolated from PD-1⁺ CD8⁺ T cells to investigate its value for predicting the response to anti-programmed cell death 1 (PD-1)/PD-ligand 1 (PD-L1) therapy in patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Two independent patient cohorts (cohort A, <i>n</i> = 25; cohort B, <i>n</i> = 15) were used as discovery and validation sets, respectively. Pre- and post-ICB peripheral blood samples were collected. In cohort A, patients with high PD-1⁺ CD8⁺ TCR diversity before ICB treatment showed better response to ICB and progression-free survival (PFS) compared with patients with low diversity [6.4 months vs. 2.5 months, HR, 0.39; 95% confidence interval (CI), 0.17-0.94; <i>P</i> = 0.021]. The results were validated in cohort B. Pre-ICB PD-1⁺ CD8⁺ TCR diversity achieved an optimal Youden's index of 0.81 (sensitivity = 0.87 and specificity = 0.94) for differentiating the ICB response in the merged dataset (cohort A plus cohort B). Patients with increased PD-1⁺ CD8⁺ TCR clonality after ICB treatment had longer PFS (7.3 months vs. 2.6 months, HR, 0.26; 95% CI, 0.08-0.86; <i>P</i> = 0.002) than those with decreased clonality. Thus, TCR diversity and clonality in peripheral blood PD-1⁺ CD8⁺ T cells may serve as noninvasive predictors of patient response to ICB and survival outcomes in NSCLC.