Tp53 Abnormalities Correlate With Immune Infiltration And Associate With Response To Flotetuzumab Immunotherapy In Acute Myeloid Leukemia

Introduction: Somatic TP53 mutations and deletions of 17p, to which TP53 is mapped, (TP53mut) occur in 8-10% of de novo Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and in up to 37-46% of patients (pts) with adverse-risk cytogenetics and treatment-related myeloid neoplasms and confer a poor prognosis. In addition to its well-characterized function as a tumor suppressor, emerging evidence implicates mutant TP53 in activating genes involved in immune response and inflammation such as chemokines, cytokines and extracellular matrix modulators. An analysis of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) transcriptomic data showed that TP53 mutations, in 30 diverse cancer types, correlated with increased leukocyte infiltration into tumors with higher proportions of PD-L1-expressing CD8+ T cells and increased expression of T-cell effector genes and interferon (IFN)-γ-related genes. We recently characterized tumor microenvironmental (TME) immune gene sets that capture elements of both type I- and IFN-γ-driven biology and stratify AML into immune-infiltrated and immune-depleted subtypes. Our immune classifier predicted survival in patients receiving cytarabine-based induction and immunotherapy with flotetuzumab (FLZ), an investigational CD123×CD3 bispecific DART® molecule. We hypothesized that TP53-mutated AML represents immune-infiltrated AML that would be particularly responsive to FLZ.