Lunit TLS for Lymphoid Structure Analysis, a Promising New Biomarker

Medical AI company Lunit announced on the 21st that it will present the results of predicting treatment response by analyzing tertiary lymphoid structures (TLS) located in tumor tissue specimens using AI at the World Conference on Lung Cancer (WCLC 2023). This study was conducted in collaboration with Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Ascension St. Francis Hospital, and Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center.

The World Conference on Lung Cancer is an academic conference specialized in lung cancer and thoracic malignancies, with more than 7,000 experts from over 100 countries participating annually. It is scheduled to be held in Singapore from the 9th to the 12th of next month.

TLS is an ectopic lymphoid organ formed by chronic inflammatory responses. It is gaining attention as one of the components that can regulate immune responses within the tumor microenvironment. Based on recent academic research showing that TLS present in areas adjacent to tumors predict the efficacy of immunotherapy, the research team used the pathology slide analyzer 'Lunit SCOPE TLS' to objectively evaluate TLS. Lunit SCOPE TLS is an AI model trained on the characteristics of TLS from 1,439 pathological H&E slides covering 18 types of cancer.

In the study, AI was applied to 85 non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICI), a type of immunotherapy, to segment TLS within the tumor microenvironment and analyze the correlation with patient survival. Among the 85 patients, 25 (29.4%) with TLS detected and 60 (70.6%) without TLS were compared, and the overall survival (OS) was significantly longer in the TLS-positive group detected by AI. Furthermore, the presence of TLS was found to be independent of PD-L1 expression, a known biomarker for predicting treatment response in NSCLC patients. This confirms that AI-based TLS analysis can be utilized as a new predictive biomarker for treatment response in NSCLC patients.

Seobum Seok, CEO of Lunit, said, "Various studies using the AI biomarker platform Lunit SCOPE and Lunit’s latest medical technologies are continuously being recognized at global conferences." He added, "Since TLS is a major immuno-oncology (I-O) biomarker of interest among global pharmaceutical companies, we expect various studies analyzing TLS using AI through Lunit SCOPE to be conducted in the future."