Sonja Althammer on Role of CD8 and PD-L1 Biomarkers for Immunotherapy in NSCLC

Sonja Althammer, PhD, Team Leader Bioinformatics at Definiens, Munich, Bavaria, Germany, discusses a study looking to define a subgroup of patients with non—small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) who respond well to treatment with the PD-L1 inhibitor durvalumab.

It was already known that PD-L1 by itself serves as biomarker to predict response to durvalumab. However, researchers hypothesized that both CD8+ and PD-L1+ cells were critical for patient response to immunotherapies.

The study determined that the combination of CD8+ and PD-L1+ both correlated with response and improved overall survival with durvalumab. An independent study is planned to validate these results.