Dr Stewart on the Multiomic Landscape of Squamous Cell Lung Cancer

Paul Stewart, PhD, assistant member, Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, Moffitt Cancer Center, discusses the multiomic landscape of squamous cell lung cancer.

At the 2023 AACR Annual Meeting, Stewart and colleagues focused on building on previous research of squamous cell lung cancer tumors by performing untargeted metabolomics to a previously studied cohort of patients. Previous research identified three proteomic subtypes, including 2 that made up the majority of tumors, which were the inflamed subtype that was enriched for B-cell rich tertiary lymphoid structures and the redox subtype that was enriched for redox pathways and NFE2L2/KEAP1 alterations with significantly less immune infiltration.

Metabolomics were conducted with a mass spectrometer to identify and calculate the abundance of a molecules in the samples, Stewart begins. This can done with proteins, referred to as proteomics, for metabolites, referred to as metabolomics, and for lipids, referred to as lipidomics, in a biological setting, Stewart notes. Investigators focused on metabolomic data in order to overlay those results with previous findings, Stewart explains.

Given that 2 phenotypes that made up the majority of tumors, Stewart and colleagues expected to find different molecular and metabolic characteristics. Although there were differences between these 2 subsets, data showed that there may be other subtypes stemming from these metabolites. These findings have ramifications for what these tumors are doing at the protein level and the metabolite level, Stewart says.

Additionally, some metabolites were significantly correlated with tertiary lymph nodes and other immune subpopulations, Stewart continues. The hope is to use these data to better understand the subtypes within squamous cell lung cancer to develop new treatments or better understand which patients could respond to immune checkpoint inhibitors, Stewart concludes.