Proteogenomics of non-small cell lung cancer reveals molecular subtypes associated with specific therapeutic targets and immune-evasion mechanisms

Lehtio and colleagues perform proteogenomic analysis of non-small cell lung cancer and identify molecular subtypes with distinct immune-evasion mechanisms and therapeutic targets and validate their classification method in separate clinical cohorts. 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-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 LAG-3 via STK11 mutation-dependent HNF1A activation and FGL1 expression. Finally, we develop a data-independent acquisition mass-spectrometry-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.