Tumor mutational burden (TMB) and PD-L1 are established biomarkers for guiding immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) therapy in advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). As ICI use expands into early-stage disease, we explored the feasibility of using TMB, which can be determined via a comprehensive genomic profiling assay along with EGFR and ALK genomic alterations, as a biomarker for outcomes in both neoadjuvant and adjuvant settings. TMB-high status (≥10 mut/Mb) showed a numerically higher, but not statistically significant, rate of pathological complete response among patients receiving neoadjuvant ICI and significantly associated with more favorable time to recurrence in patients receiving adjuvant ICI, particularly among patients with PD-L1 expression <50%. TMB should be considered in future early-stage NSCLC ICI clinical trials to further validate these results.
Quintanilha et al. (Sun,) studied this question.