Biology subjects

Postow, M. A.

Publications and source records attributed to Postow, M. A..

4 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2023

Uncovering the hidden structure of dynamic T cell composition in peripheral blood during cancer immunotherapy: a topic modeling approach

Immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs), now mainstays in the treatment of cancer treatment, show great potential but only benefit a subset of patients. A more complete understanding of the immunological mechanisms and pharmacodynamics of ICI in cancer patients will help identify the patients most likely to benefit and will generate knowledge for the development of next-generation ICI regimens. We set out to interrogate the early temporal evolution of T cell populations from longitudinal single-cell flow cytometry data. We developed an innovative statistical and computational approach using a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model that extends the concept of topic modeling used in text mining. This powerful unsupervised learning tool allows us to discover compositional topics within immune cell populations that have distinct functional and differentiation states and are biologically and clinically relevant. To illustrate the models utility, we analyzed [~]17 million T cells obtained from 138 pre- and on-treatment peripheral blood samples from a cohort of melanoma patients treated with ICIs. We identified three latent dynamic topics: a T-cell exhaustion topic that recapitulates a LAG3+ predominant patient subgroup with poor clinical outcome; a naive topic that shows association with immune-related toxicity; and an immune activation topic that emerges upon ICI treatment. We identified that a patient subgroup with a high baseline of the naive topic has a higher toxicity grade. While the current application is demonstrated using flow cytometry data, our approach has broader utility and creates a new direction for translating single-cell data into biological and clinical insights.

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2022

Whole genome error-corrected sequencing for sensitive circulating tumor DNA cancer monitoring

Circulating cell-free DNA (ccfDNA) sequencing for low-burden cancer monitoring is limited by sparsity of circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA), the abundance of genomic material within a plasma sample, and pre-analytical error rates due to library preparation, and sequencing errors. Sequencing costs have historically favored the development of deep targeted sequencing approaches for overcoming sparsity in ctDNA detection, but these techniques are limited by the abundance of ccfDNA in samples, which imposes a ceiling on the maximal depth of coverage in targeted panels. Whole genome sequencing (WGS) is an orthogonal approach to ctDNA detection that can overcome the low abundance of ccfDNA by supplanting sequencing depth with breadth, integrating signal across the entire tumor mutation landscape. However, the higher cost of WGS limits the practical depth of coverage and hinders broad adoption. Lower sequencing costs may thus allow for enhanced ctDNA cancer monitoring via WGS. We therefore applied emerging lower-cost WGS (Ultima Genomics, 1USD/Gb) to plasma samples at [~]120x coverage. Copy number and single nucleotide variation profiles were comparable between matched Ultima and Illumina datasets, and the deeper WGS coverage enabled ctDNA detection at the parts per million range. We further harnessed these lower sequencing costs to implement duplex error-corrected sequencing at the scale of the entire genome, demonstrating a [~]1,500x decrease in errors in the plasma of patient-derived xenograft mouse models, and error rates of [~]10-7 in patient plasma samples. We leveraged this highly de-noised plasma WGS to undertake cancer monitoring in the more challenging context of resectable melanoma without matched tumor sequencing. In this context, duplex-corrected WGS allowed us to harness known mutational signature patterns for disease monitoring without matched tumors, paving the way for de novo cancer monitoring.

genomics↗

bioRxiv2022

Machine learning guided signal enrichment for ultrasensitive plasma tumor burden monitoring

In solid tumor oncology, circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) is poised to transform care through accurate assessment of minimal residual disease (MRD) and therapeutic response monitoring. To overcome the sparsity of ctDNA fragments in low tumor fraction (TF) settings and increase MRD sensitivity, we previously leveraged genome-wide mutational integration through plasma whole genome sequencing (WGS). We now introduce MRD-EDGE, a composite machine learning-guided WGS ctDNA single nucleotide variant (SNV) and copy number variant (CNV) detection platform designed to increase signal enrichment. MRD-EDGE uses deep learning and a ctDNA-specific feature space to increase SNV signal to noise enrichment in WGS by 300X compared to our previous noise suppression platform MRDetect. MRD-EDGE also reduces the degree of aneuploidy needed for ultrasensitive CNV detection through WGS from 1Gb to 200Mb, thereby expanding its applicability to a wider range of solid tumors. We harness the improved performance to track changes in tumor burden in response to neoadjuvant immunotherapy in non-small cell lung cancer and demonstrate ctDNA shedding in precancerous colorectal adenomas. Finally, the radical signal to noise enrichment in MRD-EDGE enables de novo mutation calling in melanoma without matched tumor, yielding clinically informative TF monitoring for patients on immune checkpoint inhibition.

genomics↗

bioRxiv2021

Genomic characterization of metastatic patterns from prospective clinical sequencing of 25,000 patients

Progression to metastatic disease remains the main cause of cancer death. Yet, the underlying genomic mechanisms driving metastasis remain largely unknown. Here, we present MSK-MET, an integrated pan-cancer cohort of tumor genomic and clinical outcome data from more than 25,000 patients. We analyzed this dataset to identify associations between tumor genomic alterations and patterns of metastatic dissemination across 50 tumor types. We found that chromosomal instability is strongly correlated with metastatic burden in some tumor types, including prostate adenocarcinoma, lung adenocarcinoma and HR-positive breast ductal carcinoma, but not in others, such as colorectal adenocarcinoma, pancreatic adenocarcinoma and high-grade serous ovarian cancer. We also identified specific somatic alterations associated with increased metastatic burden and specific routes of metastatic spread. Our data offer a unique resource for the investigation of the biological basis for metastatic spread and highlight the crucial role of chromosomal instability in cancer progression.

cancer biology↗