e16528 Background: Immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) targeting PD-1/L1 have been approved as first-line treatment for cisplatin-ineligible patients and as second-line therapy for patients with metastatic urothelial carcinoma of the bladder. Biomarkers can help select patients who are more likely to response to ICIs. RNF43 is an E3 ubiquitin ligase that acts as a negative regulator of Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway. In colorectal cancer (CRC) patients treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs), RNF43 mutations predicted longer overall survival (OS). The impact of RNF43 mutations on the efficiency of ICIs in bladder cancer(BLC) remains to be explored. Methods: We downloaded the mutation and clinical data of 211 BLC patients treated with ICIs from the immunotherapeutic cohort published by Samstein et al. (2019). OS analyses were conducted using Kaplan-Meier curves and log-rank tests. Wilcoxon test was used for the comparison of TMB. We also downloaded a TCGA cohort for prognostic analysis. The correlations between RNF43 and immune infiltrates were analyzed in the TIMER2.0 database. Statistical significance was set at p = 0.05. Results: RNF43 mutations were identified in 4.3%(9/211) and 3%(13/438) BLC patients in the immunotherapeutic and TCGA cohort, respectively. In the immunotherapeutic cohort, patients with RNF43 mutations had significantly longer OS (25 months vs 8 months; p = 0.015) and higher tumor mutation burden(TMB, 42.3 vs 7.9; p = 3.15E-06) than RNF43-wild-type patients. Different from this, no significant difference was found in OS between RNF43-mutant and RNF43-wild-type BLC patients with standard treatment in the TCGA cohort (p = 0.696). These results indicated that RNF43 was not a prognostic factor but a predictive biomarker of survival in BLC treated with ICIs. No difference was observed in subsets of immune cells between RNF43-mutant and the RNF43-wide-type BLC patients, including neutrophils, macrophages, CD8+ T cells, Tregs, B cells and NK cells. Conclusions: RNF43 mutations may be a predictor of survival benefit from ICIs in bladder cancer and correlated with higher TMB. Further studies in other ICI-treated cohorts are needed to confirm these results.
Correction:Characterization of tumor mutation burden, PD-L1 and DNA repair genes to assess relationship to immune checkpoint inhibitors response in metastatic renal cell carcinoma
