Explaining and predicting pseudoprogression in immunotherapythrough joint modeling of immune infiltration and ctDNA dynamics

Abstract

Pseudoprogression in response to immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) therapy can be a complex challenge during treatment response evaluation. Erroneous classification of progression may result in stopping effective treatment for patients, while delayed confirmation of progression can prolong an ineffective treatment course. We develop a mechanistic mathematical model of tumor-immune dynamics under ICI treatment in which observed tumor volume includes contributions from both tumor burden and immune infiltration. We show analytically how pseudoprogression can arise from increased immune infiltration and proliferation as well as continued tumor growth during the ``ramp-up" phase. The model also incorporates circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) dynamics, which we demonstrate are able to closely fit existing longitudinal tumor and ctDNA data and extract realistic parameter ranges to generate representative in silico data. Using model-generated cohorts, we train a random forest (RF) classifier using longitudinal tumor and ctDNA measurements to distinguish pseudoprogression and true progression, and demonstrate that it improves response classification relative to the Response Evaluation Criteria in Solid Tumors (RECIST 1.1) and provides classification earlier than the immunotherapy-specific iRECIST, even in the presence of tumor measurement noise. This work predicts that paired longitudinal tumor-ctDNA measurements may enable earlier discrimination of true progression from pseudoprogression, and motivates collection of imaging and ctDNA data synchronously during ICI therapy, especially in the setting of suspected disease progression.