Combination therapy with anti-PD-1 and anti-CTLA-4 is now indicated in many cancers. It appears to be more effective than anti-PD-1 monotherapy, but more toxic.
This work has shown that plasma levels of soluble CD27 are inversely correlated with survival in melanoma patients treated with anti-PD-1. This result was validated in 2 independent cohorts of patients representing 180 patients in total. Interestingly, this predicting role of sCD27 in anti-PD-1 treated melanoma patients was found both with an optimal cut-off defined by the Youden test, but also with the same cut-off previously defined in kidney cancer. This suggests some analytical robustness of this marker. Inventors have also shown that plasma sCD27 levels prior to anti-PD-1 treatment are inversely correlated with progression free survival (PFS). On the contrary, in patients with metastatic melanoma treated with anti-PD-1 and anti-CTLA-4, plasma sCD27 levels are not statistically significantly associated with patient survival or progression-free survival. They therefore find a discrepancy between the predictive impact of sCD27 on survival of patients treated with anti-PD-1 immunotherapy alone or with combined anti-PD-1 and anti-CTLA-4 immunotherapy. Plasma sCD27 concentrations represents a new type of biomarker to help in the management of these patients.