Prognostic Impact of An Integrative Landscape of Clinical, Immune, and Molecular Features in Non-Metastatic Rectal Cancer

Abstract

Rectal Cancer (RC) is a complex disease that involves highly variable treatment responses. Currently, there is a lack of reliable markers beyond TNM to deliver a personalized treatment in a cancer setting where the goal is a curative treatment. Here, we performed an integrated characterization of the predictive and prognostic role of clinical features, mismatch-repair deficiency markers, HER2, CDX2, PD-L1 expression, and CD3^-CD8⁺ tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) coupled with targeted DNA sequencing of 76 non-metastatic RC patients assigned to total mesorectal excision upfront (TME; n = 15) or neoadjuvant chemo-radiotherapy treatment (nCRT; n = 61) followed by TME. Eighty-two percent of RC cases displayed mutations affecting cancer driver genes such as TP53, APC, KRAS, ATM, and PIK3CA. Good response to nCRT treatment was observed in approximately 40% of the RC cases, and poor pathological tumor regression was significantly associated with worse disease-free survival (DFS, HR = 3.45; 95%CI = 1.14-10.4; p = 0.028). High neutrophils-platelets score (NPS) (OR = 10.52; 95%CI=1.34-82.6; p = 0.025) and KRAS mutated cases (OR = 5.49; 95%CI = 1.06-28.4; p = 0.042) were identified as independent predictive factors of poor response to nCRT treatment in a multivariate analysis. Furthermore, a Cox proportional-hazard model showed that the KRAS mutational status was an independent prognostic factor associated with higher risk of local recurrence (HR = 9.68; 95%CI = 1.01-93.2; p <0.05) and shorter DFS (HR = 2.55; 95%CI = 1.05-6.21; p <0.05), while high CEA serum levels were associated with poor DFS (HR = 2.63; 95%CI = 1.01-6.85; p <0.05). Integrated clinical and molecular-based unsupervised analysis allowed us to identify two RC prognostic groups (cluster 1 and cluster 2) associated with disease-specific OS (HR = 20.64; 95%CI = 2.63-162.2; p <0.0001), metastasis-free survival (HR = 3.67; 95%CI = 1.22-11; p = 0.012), local recurrence-free survival (HR = 3.34; 95%CI = 0.96-11.6; p = 0.043) and worse DFS (HR = 2.68; 95%CI = 1.18-6.06; p = 0.012). The worst prognosis cluster 2 was enriched by stage III high-risk clinical tumors, poor responders to nCRT, with low TILs density and high frequency of KRAS and TP53 mutated cases compared with the best prognosis cluster 1 (p <0.05). Overall, this study provides a comprehensive and integrated characterization of non-metastatic RC cases as a new insight to deliver a personalized therapeutic approach.

Keywords: biomarkers; mutational profile; non-metastatic; precision medicine; rectal cancer.