Pan-cancer quantification of neoantigen-mediated immunoediting in cancer evolution

Abstract Immunoediting, which includes three temporally distinct stages, termed elimination, equilibrium, and escape, has been proposed to explain the interactions between cancer cells and the immune system during the evolution of cancer. However the status of immunoediting in cancer remains unclear, and the existence of neoantigen depletion signal in untreated cancer has been debated. Here we developed a distribution pattern based method for quantifying neoantigen mediated negative selection in cancer evolution. Our method provides a robust and reliable quantification for immunoediting signal in an individual cancer patient. The prevalence of immunoediting signal in immunotherapy untreated cancer genome has been demonstrated with this method. Importantly, the elimination and escape stages of immunoediting can be quantified separately, tumor types with strong immunoediting-elimination tend to have weak immunoediting-escape signal, and vice versa. Quantified immunoediting-elimination signal predicts cancer immunotherapy clinical response. Immunoediting quantification provides an evolutional perspective for evaluating the antigenicity of neoantigen, and reveals a potential biomarker for cancer precision immunotherapy.