Background
In patients with muscle-invasive urothelial bladder cancer (MIBC), molecular alterations in immunotherapy-resistant tumors found at radical cystectomy (RC) remain largely unstudied.
Objective
To investigate the biology of pembrolizumab-resistant tumors in comparison to an RC cohort treated without any systemic therapy and a cohort of neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC)-treated tumors.
Design, setting, and participants
Transcriptome-wide expression profiling was performed on 26 RC samples from patients with ypT2-4 disease after pembrolizumab treatment, of which 22 had matched pretherapy samples. Unsupervised consensus clustering (CC) was performed to compare 26 post-pembrolizumab samples with 94 RC samples without neoadjuvant treatment and 21 samples collected from the former tumor bed of NAC-treated patients (scar tissue). Clusters were investigated for their biological and clinical characteristics and were compared to a cohort of post-NAC tumors (n = 133).
Outcome measurements and statistical analysis
Patient and tumor characteristics were compared between subgroups using χ2 tests and two-sided Wilcoxon rank-sum tests. The primary endpoint was recurrence-free survival.
Results and limitations
Molecular subtyping of pre- and post-pembrolizumab samples revealed significant differences: only 36% of samples had a concordant subtype according to the consensus classifier. Unsupervised CC revealed three distinct post-pembrolizumab clusters (basal, luminal, and scar-like). A scar-like subtype was present in 50% of the post-pembrolizumab cases (n = 13) and expressed genes associated with wound healing/scarring. This subtype had higher luminal marker expression in the post-pembrolizumab setting compared to CC scar-like tumors from the other cohorts. Patients with the scar-like subtype showed favorable prognosis after systemic therapy, but not in the RC-only setting. The small numbers in each subgroup represents the major study limitation.
Conclusions
This study expands our understanding of the biology of pembrolizumab-resistant MIBC and provides a framework for defining molecular subtypes after treatment. The results further support the hypothesis that luminal-type tumors may be resistant to immunotherapy or that this treatment may select for, or induce, a luminal phenotype.
