Despite major advancements in lung cancer treatment, long-term survival is still rare, and a deeper understanding of molecular phenotypes would allow the identification of specific cancer dependencies and immune evasion mechanisms. Here we performed in-depth mass spectrometry (MS)-based proteogenomic analysis of 141 tumors representing all major histologies of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). We identified six distinct proteome subtypes with striking differences in immune cell composition and subtype-specific expression of immune checkpoints. Unexpectedly, high neoantigen burden was linked to global hypomethylation and complex neoantigens mapped to genomic regions, such as endogenous retroviral elements and introns, in immune-cold subtypes. Further, we linked immune evasion with LAG3 via STK11 mutation-dependent HNF1A activation and FGL1 expression. Finally, we develop a data-independent acquisition MS-based NSCLC subtype classification method, validate it in an independent cohort of 208 NSCLC cases and demonstrate its clinical utility by analyzing an additional cohort of 84 late-stage NSCLC biopsy samples.
The associated publication reports proteogenomic analysis of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), where we identified molecular subtypes with distinct immune evasion mechanisms and therapeutic targets, and validated our classification method in separate clinical cohorts. The in-depth proteomic analysis pointed to a potential role of STK11 inactivation in liver-specific signaling and subsequent cancer growth and immune evasion mechanisms. This protocol describes in vitro validation of the downstream effects of STK11-AMPK signaling on HNF1A and FGL1 in a liver and two lung cancer cell lines.
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