Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
Lung cancer is the leading cause of death from cancer in Taiwan and throughout the world. Immunotherapy has revealed promising and significant efficacy in NSCLC, through immune checkpoint inhibition by blocking programmed cell death protein (PD) -1/PD-1 ligand (PD-L1) signaling pathway to restore patients' T-cell immunity. One novel type of long, non-coding RNAs, circular RNAs (circRNAs), are endogenous, stable, and widely expressed in tissues, saliva, blood, urine, and exosomes. Our previous results revealed that the plasma level of hsacirc₀000190 can be monitored by liquid-biopsy-based droplet digital PCR and may serve as a valuable blood-based biomarker to monitor the disease progression and the efficacy of immunotherapy. In this study, hsacirc₀000190 was shown to increase the PD-L1 mRNA-mediated soluble PD-L1 (sPD-L1) expression, consequently interfering with the efficacy of anti-PD-L1 antibody and T-cell activation, which may result in immunotherapy resistance and poor outcome. Our results unraveled that hsacirc₀000190 facilitated the tumorigenesis and immune evasion of NSCLC by upregulating sPD-L1 expression, potentially developing a different aspect in elucidating the molecular immunopathogenesis of NSCLC. Hsacirc₀000190 upregulation can be an effective indicator for the progression of NSCLC, and hsacirc₀000190 downregulation may possess a potential therapeutic value for the treatment of NSCLC in combination with immunotherapy.
Luo et al. (Wed,) studied this question.