Intratumor heterogeneity of stage IA lung adenocarcinoma by multiregion whole exome sequencing and association with survival.
8545 Background: Our previous study has suggested that complex genomic intratumor heterogeneity (gITH) was associated with an increased risk of relapse in patients with localized lung adenocarcinomas (LUAD). We have launched a study to investigate molecular and immune profile ITH of Stage IA NSCLC (a patient population with no optimal biomarker to guide postsurgical therapy) to understand the molecular evolution during early carcinogenesis and to identify biomarkers for early detection and intervention. Here, we report the preliminary analysis on gITH. Methods: We performed multiregion whole exome sequencing on 30 Stage IA LUAD and matched normal lung tissue to a median sequencing depth of 494x. 15 patients have relapsed within 3 years post-surgery (cases) and 15 patients have not relapsed with a minimum of 5-year postsurgical follow up (controls). Cases and controls are 1:1 matched for the key prognostic factors including tumor size, smoking status, age, gender, ethnicity and lobectomy or wedge resection. Shannon diversity index (SDI) was used to quantify ITH in each individual tumor. Kaplan-Meier method was used to evaluate the relationship between ITH and disease-free survival (DFS) as well as overall survival (OS). Results: Consistent with our previous study, 108 of 110 (98.2%) canonical cancer gene mutations were shared events by all regions of individual tumor. Compared to non-relapsed controls, tumors from relapsed cases demonstrated significantly higher degree of ITH (SDI of 1.78 in cases vs 1.58 for controls, p = 0.016). Higher degree of gITH was associated with shorter DFS (p = 0.008) and shorter OS (p = 0.0153). Significantly higher mutation burden was observed in tumors from relapsed patients (median of 10.86 mutations per MB in cases vs 7.45 mutations per MB in controls, p = 0.03). Analysis of gITH on a larger cohort and on predicted neoantigen, methylation, gene expression and immune profiles are in progress. Conclusions: Majority of cancer gene mutations are clonal events during early carcinogenesis of LUAD. Complex gITH may be associated with more aggressive biology and inferior clinical outcome in patients with Stage IA LUAD, therefore, may be evaluated as a potential biomarker.