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Review
. 2018 Dec;7(6):716-721.
doi: 10.21037/tlcr.2018.09.26.

Tumor mutational burden in non-small cell lung cancer-the pathologist's point of view

Frédérique Penault-Llorca  1 , Nina Radosevic-Robin  1
Affiliations
Review

Tumor mutational burden in non-small cell lung cancer-the pathologist's point of view

Frédérique Penault-Llorca et al. Transl Lung Cancer Res. 2018 Dec.

Abstract

In non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), the pathologist has contributed to the development of personalized medicine from the determination of the right histological type to EGFR and ALK/ROS1 molecular screening for targeted therapies. With the development of immunotherapies, pathologists intervene forefront with programmed death-ligand 1 (PD-L1) immunohistochemical testing, companion test for pembrolizumab monotherapy, first line and complementary test to the other programmed cell death-1 (PD-1) PD-L1 inhibitors. Recently, tumor mutational burden has emerged as a promising tool to evaluate sensitivity to immunotherapy (IO). The pathologist has a crucial role in the setting of tumor mutational burden (TMB) testing for the selection and the preparation of the sample for high throughput molecular analysis, and in the first steps of the next-generation sequencing (NGS) workflow.

Keywords: Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC); biomarkers; immunotherapy (IO); preanalytical; quality assurance; tumor mutational load.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflicts of Interest: Frédérique Penault-Llorca has received research grants and honoria from Astrazeneca, BMS, MSD and Roche. The other author has no conflicts of interest to declare.

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