Anatomic pathology selected abstracts
September 2020—Identifying patients who respond to immune checkpoint blockade is a significant challenge in oncology. PD-L1 expression by immunohistochemistry is the diagnostic gold standard for patient selection, but it does not capture all patients who may respond to immune checkpoint blockade (ICB). Recent gene-expression studies of high-grade serous ovarian carcinoma have defined an immunoreactive molecular subtype that shows a measurable favorable difference in patient survival compared with nonimmunoreactive subtypes, but no studies have demonstrated its impact on predicting response to ICB. As a step toward establishing the predictive value of gene-expression classifiers in ICB, the authors assessed the relationship between PD-L1 IHC and molecular subtypes of ovarian epithelial cancer. They analyzed 93 tissue specimens from patients with stages III and IV disease and compared PD-L1 IHC with gene expression by Agilent microarrays using The Cancer Genome Atlas-defined subtypes.