The use of CDKi with ET has revolutionized the management of HR + HER2- metastatic breast cancer due to their favorable toxicity profiles and their relevant antitumor activity [5, 22, 23]. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and European Medicines Agency (EMA) have approved the clinical use of CDKi such as palbociclib, ribociclib, and abemaciclib in metastatic breast cancer patients with HR+/HER2- in the first line setting as well as the second line in combination with ET. In clinical trials, all FDA approved CDKi when combined with ET have demonstrated a significant prolongation of PFS compared with ET alone [5, 6].
Approximately half of all patients with metastatic breast cancer develop liver metastases and 5–12% of patients exhibit liver metastases as the primary site of breast cancer recurrence [24, 25]. If untreated, liver metastases are associated with a dismal prognosis and a median survival of only 4–8 months [26]. Moreover, most MBC patients who respond to first-line therapy will progress within 1–2 years [27], and 5-year OS rates for all MBC subtypes are less than 25%. In addition, ER + MBC patients with lung or liver metastasis compared to patients with the bone predominant disease have a significantly shorter median PFS to ET +/- CDKi [28, 29]. Hence, there is an urgent need for clinically useful predictive biomarkers that can identify patients with liver metastases likely to benefit from ET/CDKi.
Many previous studies have investigated the role of molecular alterations in the tumor such as pRB, RB1 mutations, CCDN1amplifications, and CCNE1 overexpression as potential biomarkers for CDKi response but these investigations have not yielded any identification of a clinically useful predictive biomarker so far [30–32]. A growing body of research suggests that loss of the retinoblastoma tumor suppressor gene (Rb), leads to accelerated angiogenesis and tumor progression which is one of the most important biomarkers associated with acquired resistance and lower PFS to CDKi [33, 34].
In this study, we investigated the role of delta radiomic features on baseline and post-treatment CT scans from HR+/HER2- breast cancer patients with liver metastasis to predict response and overall survival after CDKi therapy. A nomogram model that integrated radiomic scores with clinical biomarkers was developed in this study. Our nomogram model showed that radiomic scores had a better prognostic performance for predicting OS compared to clinical biomarkers alone. Moreover, the decision curve analysis (DCA) showed that the radiomic score had a better overall net benefit compared to clinical biomarkers for predicting high-risk patients suitable to receive more aggressive therapy across several threshold probability values. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first attempt for predicting response in breast cancer patients treated with CDKi in the context of radiomic feature analysis.
We found that higher intratumoral Haralick entropy that captures tumor heterogeneity was associated with non-response to CDKi/ET and poor OS. Previous studies have shown that tumor heterogeneity increment is indicative of genomic heterogeneity and is associated with a worse prognosis in non-small cell lung cancer patients treated with immunotherapy or chemotherapy [35–37]. By contrast, decrement of intratumoral heterogeneity is associated with a favorable response to therapy and prolonged PFS. A previous study by Wander et al. showed that harmonic alterations in RB1, AURKA, and CCNE2 expression enhance sensitivity to CDKi therapy. In other words, heterogeneity increase resistance to CDKi therapy [34].
Angiogenesis is another hallmark of cancer proliferation and tumor metastases [38]. We found that peritumoral Laws feature increment after therapy, likely reflecting increased angiogenesis and tumor microenvironment heterogeneity, which is associated with poor therapeutic response and OS [33, 34, 39].
In addition, p16 (tumor suppressor) downregulation leads to increased HIF-α which in turn causes tumor hypoxia, which is known to confer therapeutic resistance [40]. Prior evidence suggests that a hypoxic tumor environment might be captured by radiomic texture analysis of lesions extracted from CT images [35].
Moreover, there is also some evidence suggesting that CDKi can elicit their therapeutic response by enhancing the activation of T-cells [41]. It can be postulated that increment in peritumoral Gabor radiomics after therapy might be capturing the increment in tumor immune environment that is caused by CDKi therapy.
Finally, we found that delta radiomic features were also able to assess early response to CDKi/ET. Our results suggest that our radiomic model can help to monitor early response in patients undergoing CDKi therapy. The ability to determine early response during treatment will allow early adjustment of treatment regimens. In the future, such validated image-based radiomic biomarkers can potentially identify non-responders and will enable oncologists to predict residual endocrine sensitivity and reduce ineffective treatment, toxicity, and side effects associated with CDKi therapy and timely change to other effective target therapies, including subsequent CDK4/6 and PI3K/AKT/mTOR inhibitors [42]. Such validated biomarkers can also identify those patients that would benefit from CDKi versus those patients that would benefit from the standard status quo.
We acknowledge that our study did have its limitations. While we used two independent cohorts of patients for building and validating our model, the cohort size in this study is relatively small but it is quite challenging to assemble large cohorts for this problem due to a small number of patients treated with this relatively new therapy. The second limitation is the retrospective nature of our study, not a prospective study. To tackle this limitation, validation on a large multi-site prospective cohort is required. Also, there are questions on variability in scanning differences between scanners such as convolution kernels, reconstruction algorithms, and slice thickness, that hinder widespread applicability of radiomic features, although some studies have shown novel radiomic features that are relatively immune to differences in image-related variabilities [43]. Also, further work is needed to be done to perform extensive stratified analyses to explore the relationship between the molecular and mutational status of the tumors and radiomics in this patient population.
We hope to address these limitations in future works. In addition, we need to develop and validate the signature as predictive of the maximum benefit of CDKi therapy. However, it needs a randomized controlled trial (RCT) design (where patients were treated with two regimens - status quo and CDKi) and then demonstrates the predictive benefit of CDKi therapy.
Nonetheless, despite these limitations, our study revealed that dynamic change of CT-based radiomic texture features between baseline and post-treatment of HR+, HER2- breast cancer patients with liver metastasis can predict early response and OS to CDKi coupled with ET.