Soluble Ligand of the Immune Checkpoint Receptor (sPD-L1) in Blood Serum of Patients with Renal Cell Carcinoma

• Published in: Bulletin of experimental biology and medicine Vol. 166; no. 3; pp. 353 - 357
• Main Authors: Kushlinskii, N. E., Gershtein, E. S., Morozov, A. A., Goryacheva, I. O., Filipenko, M. L., Alferov, A. A., Bezhanova, S. D., Bazaev, V. V., Kazantseva, I. A.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 01-01-2019; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Benign; Biomedical and Life Sciences; Biomedicine; Cell Biology; Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay; Immune checkpoint; Internal Medicine; Kidney cancer; Laboratory Medicine; Ligands; Lymph nodes; Metastases; Metastasis; Pathology; PD-1 protein; PD-L1 protein; Platinum; Renal cell carcinoma; Tumors; renal cell carcinoma; immune checkpoint proteins; blood serum; sPD-L1
• ISSN: 0007-4888; 1573-8221
• DOI: 10.1007/s10517-019-04349-8

The content of the soluble ligand of the immune checkpoint receptor (sPD-L1) was determined in the blood serum of 106 patients with renal cell carcinoma and 11 patients with benign kidney tumors by direct ELISA (Human sPD-L1 Platinum ELISA; Affimetrix, eBioscience). The control group included 19 healthy men and 18 women. Serum level of sPD-L1 significantly surpassed the control values in both patients with primary renal cancer (
p
<0.0001) and in patients examined during disease progression (
p
<0.05). In patients with benign kidney tumors, the level of this marker was significantly higher than in the control (
p
<0.05), but lower than in patients with renal cell carcinoma. The sPD-L1 level significantly increased with disease stage (
p
<0.001); it was higher in the presence of metastases in regional lymph nodes irrespective of their number (N1 or N2) than in the absence of metastases (N0); it was also increased in patients with distant metastases (M1) and patients with grade III-IV tumors in comparison with grade III-IV tumors (
p
<0.05). The highest sPD-L1 levels were recorded in patients with tumor size corresponding to T2 and T3 and decreased in patients with T4 tumors. Thus, sPD-L1 level in patients with renal cell carcinoma correlated with tumor grade and metastasizing and can be considered as a promising marker in monitoring of the effect of anti-PD1/PD-L1 therapy.