Fadare, Oluwole

ImportancePathologic complete response (pCR) after neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) in breast cancer strongly correlates with overall survival and has become the standard end point in neoadjuvant trials. However, there is controversy regarding whether the definition of pCR should exclude or permit the presence of residual ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS).ObjectiveTo examine the association of residual DCIS in surgical specimens after neoadjuvant chemotherapy for breast cancer with survival end points to inform standards for the assessment of pathologic complete response.Design, Setting, and ParticipantsThe study team analyzed the association of residual DCIS after NAC with 3-year event-free survival (EFS), distant recurrence-free survival (DRFS), and local-regional recurrence (LRR) in the I-SPY2 trial, an adaptive neoadjuvant platform trial for patients with breast cancer at high risk of recurrence. This is a retrospective analysis of clinical specimens and data from the ongoing I-SPY2 adaptive platform trial of novel therapeutics on a background of standard of care for early breast cancer. I-SPY2 participants are adult women diagnosed with stage II/III breast cancer at high risk of recurrence.InterventionsParticipants were randomized to receive taxane and anthracycline-based neoadjuvant therapy with or without 1 of 10 investigational agents, followed by definitive surgery.Main Outcomes and MeasuresThe presence of DCIS and EFS, DRFS, and LRR.ResultsThe study team identified 933 I-SPY2 participants (aged 24 to 77 years) with complete pathology and follow-up data. Median follow-up time was 3.9 years; 337 participants (36%) had no residual invasive disease (residual cancer burden 0, or pCR). Of the 337 participants with pCR, 70 (21%) had residual DCIS, which varied significantly by tumor-receptor subtype; residual DCIS was present in 8.5% of triple negative tumors, 15.6% of hormone-receptor positive tumors, and 36.6% of ERBB2-positive tumors. Among those participants with pCR, there was no significant difference in EFS, DRFS, or LRR based on presence or absence of residual DCIS.Conclusions and RelevanceThe analysis supports the definition of pCR as the absence of invasive disease after NAC regardless of the presence or absence of DCIS.Trial RegistrationClinicalTrials.gov Identifier NCT01042379.

Abstract Background: The IMpassion130 study demonstrated prolonged overall survival when atezolizumab, a PD-L1 inhibitor, was added to nab-paclitaxel in PD-L1 positive patients with advanced triple negative breast cancer (TNBC). Approximately 40% of tumors were PD-L1 positive, utilizing a cutoff of ≥ 1% immune cell (IC) staining with the Ventana SP142 immunohistochemical (IHC) assay. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved this assay as a companion test to determine patient eligibility for atezolizumab therapy. However, literature in lung cancer shows that pathologists have a high discordance in assessing PD-L1 on IC. The FDA companion test documentation for SP142 shows high inter-laboratory reproducibility with nearly 95% overall percent agreement (OPA) between 2 readers for 2 category scoring of IC (positive versus negative) in TNBC in a central laboratory. PD-L1 testing for breast cancer is now becoming widespread in pathology laboratories. The goal of this study was to assess concordance in PD-L1 scoring between 19 pathologists from 14 institutions examining the same 86 TNBC tissues stained with the SP142 and SP263 antibodies. We also present a new method to determine the minimum number for evaluators needed to estimate concordance between large numbers of readers as occurs in real life setting. Methods: Full tissue sections were stained exactly as prescribed on the label on the Ventana Benchmark with the SP142 and SP263 PD-L1 assays. Sixty-eight and 76 cases were evaluable respectively. Stained slides were scanned and digital files distributed to pathologists who independently scored cases as either negative (< 1% IC staining) or positive (≥ 1% IC staining) and estimated the % of IC staining for positive cases. We applied a method that we call Observers Needed to Evaluate Subjective Tests (ONEST). For any combination of pathologists, we can quantify the degree of overall agreement using the proportion of tissue samples upon which all selected pathologists agreed, which can lead to a plot of non-increasing trajectory of agreement as the number of pathologists increases. We computed and plotted the empirical estimate of the overall agreement with the 95% confidence interval (CI) from 1000 randomly selected permutations of the pathologists. Results: PD-L1 was interpreted as positive with SP263 in an average of 78% of cases compared to 58% with the SP142 assay (p<.0001). IC positive continuous scores ranged from 1-95% (mean=20%) and 1-90% (mean=10%) for SP263 and SP142. Complete 2 category (positive vs negative) scoring concordance across all observers was achieved in 38 cases (50%) with SP263 and 26 cases (38%) with SP142. The intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) for 2 category scoring of SP263 and SP142 was 0.513 and 0.560 respectively. ONEST plots made for each assay for 19 pathologists showed a decrease in OPA as number of observers increased, reaching a low plateau of approximately 0.46 at 10 observers for SP263 and 0.42 at 8 observers for SP142. Conclusions: Utilizing the FDA approved SP142 assay, we found a higher prevalence of PD-L1 positive tumors than published in the IMpassion130 trial but lower prevalence than seen with the SP263 assay. The different proportion of positive cases seen with two different assays highlights the need to establish cutoffs for each assay to correspond with clinical benefit. The ICC of scoring immune cells with both PD-L1 assays showed poor reproducibility across multiple pathologists. The ONEST analysis finds a plateau with 10 pathologists, only reaching an OPA of 0.4 for immune cell assessment. This suggests that more than half of the pathologists in real world situations may mis-assign patient IC scores. This could lead to a high percentage of patients either receiving atezolizumab, when they are unlikely to benefit or not receiving atezolizumab when they may benefit. Citation Format: Emily Suzanne Reisenbichler, Gang Han, Vasiliki Pelekanou, Vesal Yaghoobi, Fahad S Ahmed, Andrew Bellizzi, Veerle Bossuyt, Jane Brock, Kimberly Cole, Oluwole Fadare, Omar Hameed, Krisztina Hanley, Beth T Harrison, M G Kuba, Amy Ly, Dylan Miller, Mirna Podoll, Anja C Roden, Mary A Sanders, Kamaljeet Singh, Shi Wei, Hannah Wen, Lajos Pusztai, David L Rimm. Prospective multi-institutional evaluation of pathologist assessment of PD-L1 assays in triple negative breast cancer [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 2019 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium; 2019 Dec 10-14; San Antonio, TX. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2020;80(4 Suppl):Abstract nr PD5-01.

A repeat survey of the Association of the Directors of Anatomic and Surgical Pathology, done 10 years after the original was used to assess trends and variability in classifying scenarios as errors, and the preferred post signout report modification for correcting error by the membership of the Association of the Directors of Anatomic and Surgical Pathology. The results were analyzed to inform on whether interpretive amendment rates might act as surrogate measures of interpretive error in pathology. An analyses of the responses indicated that primary level misinterpretations (benign to malignant and vice versa) were universally qualified as error; secondary-level misinterpretations or misclassifications were inconsistently labeled error. There was added variability in the preferred post signout report modification used to correct report alterations. The classification of a scenario as error appeared to correlate with severity of potential harm of the missed call, the perceived subjectivity of the diagnosis, and ambiguity of reporting terminology. Substantial differences in policies for error detection and optimal reporting format were documented between departments. In conclusion, the inconsistency in labeling scenarios as error, disagreement about the optimal post signout report modification for the correction of the error, and variability in error detection policies preclude the use of the misinterpretation amendment rate as a surrogate measure for error in anatomic pathology. There is little change in uniformity of definition, attitudes and perception of interpretive error in anatomic pathology in the last 10 years.

Abstract Background: Patients achieving a pathologic complete response (pCR) following neoadjuvant therapy have significantly improved event-free survival relative to those who do not; and pCR is an FDA-accepted endpoint to support accelerated approval of novel agents/combinations in the neoadjuvant treatment of high risk early stage breast cancer. Previous studies have shown that recurrence risk increased with increasing burden of residual disease (as assessed by the RCB index). As well, these studies suggest that patients with minimum residual disease (RCB-I class) also have favorable outcomes (comparable to those achieving a pCR) within high risk tumor subtypes. In this study, we assess whether integrating RCB with MRI functional tumor volume (FTV), which in itself is prognostic, can improve prediction of distant recurrence free survival (DRFS); and identify a subset of patients with minimal residual disease with comparable DRFS as those who achieved a pCR. Imaging tools can then be used to identify the subset that will do well early and guide the timing of surgical therapy. Method: We performed a pooled analysis of 596 patients from the I-SPY2 TRIAL with RCB, pre-surgical MRI FTV data and known follow-up (median 2.5 years). We first assessed whether FTV predicts residual disease (pCR or pCR/RCB-I) using ROC analysis. We applied a power transformation to normalize the pre-surgical FTV distribution; and assessed its association with DRFS using a bi-variate Cox proportional hazard model adjusting for HR/HER2 subtype. We also fitted a bivariate Cox model of RCB index adjusting for subtype; and assessed whether adding pre-surgical FTV to this model further improves association with DRFS using a likelihood ratio (LR) test. For the Cox modeling, penalized splines approximation of the transformed FTV and RCB index with 2 degrees of freedom was used to allow for non-linear effects of FTV and RCB on DRFS. Result: Pre-surgical MRI FTV is significantly associated with DRFS (Wald p<0.00001), and more effective at predicting pCR/RCB-I than predicting pCR alone (AUC: 0.72 vs. 0.65). Larger pre-surgical FTV remains associated with worse DRFS adjusting for subtype (Wald p <0.00001). The RCB index is also significantly associated with DRFS adjusting for subtype (Wald p<0.00001). Adding FTV to a model containing RCB and subtype further improves association with DRFS (LR p=0.0007). RCB-I patients have excellent DRFS (94% at 3 years compared to 95% in the pCR group). Efforts are underway to identify an optimal threshold for dichotomizing pre-surgical FTV and FTV change measures for use in combination with pCR/RCB-I class to generate integrated RCB (iRCB) groups as a composite predictor of DRFS. Conclusion: Pre-surgical MRI FTV is effective at predicting minimal residual disease (RCB0/I) in the I-SPY 2 TRIAL. Despite the association between FTV and RCB, FTV appears to provide independent added prognostic value (to RCB and subtype), suggesting that integrating MRI volume measures and RCB into a composite predictor may improve DRFS prediction. Citation Format: Hylton NM, Symmans WF, Yau C, Li W, Hatzis C, Isaacs C, Albain KS, Chen Y-Y, Krings G, Wei S, Harada S, Datnow B, Fadare O, Klein M, Pambuccian S, Chen B, Adamson K, Sams S, Mhawech-Fauceglia P, Magliocco A, Feldman M, Rendi M, Sattar H, Zeck J, Ocal I, Tawfik O, Grasso LeBeau L, Sahoo S, Vinh T, Yang S, Adams A, Chien AJ, Ferero-Torres A, Stringer-Reasor E, Wallace A, Boughey JC, Ellis ED, Elias AD, Lang JE, Lu J, Han HS, Clark AS, Korde L, Nanda R, Northfelt DW, Khan QJ, Viscusi RK, Euhus DM, Edmiston KK, Chui SY, Kemmer K, Wood WC, Park JW, Liu MC, Olopade O, Tripathy D, Moulder SL, Rugo HS, Schwab R, Lo S, Helsten T, Beckwith H, Haugen PK, van't Veer LJ, Perlmutter J, Melisko ME, Wilson A, Peterson G, Asare AL, Buxton MB, Paoloni M, Clennell JL, Hirst GL, Singhrao R, Steeg K, Matthews JB, Sanil A, Berry SM, Abe H, Wolverton D, Crane EP, Ward KA, Nelson M, Niell BL, Oh K, Brandt KR, Bang DH, Ojeda-Fournier H, Eghtedari M, Sheth PA, Bernreuter WK, Umphrey H, Rosen MA, Dogan B, Yang W, Joe B, I-SPY 2 TRIAL Consortium, Yee D, Pusztai L, DeMichele A, Asare SM, Berry DA, Esserman LJ. Refining neoadjuvant predictors of three year distant metastasis free survival: Integrating volume change as measured by MRI with residual cancer burden [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 2018 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium; 2018 Dec 4-8; San Antonio, TX. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2019;79(4 Suppl):Abstract nr P2-07-03.