MED12-STAT1-TAP2 axis regulates CD8 + T cell cytotoxicity and mediates immunotherapy outcome in non-small cell lung cancer

Abstract

Although immunotherapy for late-stage non-small cell lung carcinoma (NSCLC) has been clinically utilized, its prognosis remains highly heterogeneous, prompting us to investigate novel predictive immunotherapy biomarkers for NSCLC. We analyzed the correlations between MED12 nonsynonymous mutations and survival, clinical, genomic, transcriptomic information, and immune infiltration information through data mining across multiple datasets. We also investigated the mechanism of MED12 using luciferase assay, Western blot, ChIP-PCR, and siRNA. MED12 is significantly associated with survival in completely independent immunotherapy datasets, including MSKCC (N = 350), Naiyer2015 (N = 34), our own (N = 295) and the pan-cancer dataset, but not in the TCGA dataset, where patients received non-immunotherapy regimens. Mutations in MED12 showed no significant correlation with known metrics (TMB, IPS/CTLA4/PD1 status, PD-1/PD-L1 expression, and TCR/BCR status) or DNA Damage Repair (DDR) pathway mutations, yet they carried independent prognostic information according to the Cox multivariate regression. On the other hand, MED12 mutation is significantly associated with multiple immune-related pathways and immune infiltration of CD8 + T cells and activated NK cells. Lactate dehydrogenase assay revealed that knockdown of TAP2 restored the upregulation of CD8 + T cell cytotoxicity triggered by MED12 knockdown. ChIP-PCR, luciferase assay and siRNA knock down assay indicate that MED12 binds to the promoter region of STAT1 to suppress its transcription, while the transcription factor STAT1 promotes the transcription of TAP2, thus inhibiting the antigen processing and presentation. Collectively, MED12 mutation is an independent and valuable biomarker for predicting the response to immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI)therapy in NSCLC by modulating CD8 + T cell cytotoxicity via the STAT1/TAP2 axis.