Differential expression of PD-L1 between primary and metastatic epithelial ovarian cancer and its clinico-pathological correlation

Ovarian cancer (OC) is one of the most common gynecologic cancer, which has the worst prognosis and highest mortality rate. The lack of curative treatment and the high relapse rate, especially in advanced OC, continues to present a clinical challenge, highlighting the need for new therapeutic strategies. This study was performed to compare the expression of PD-L1 in primary epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) and their corresponding peritoneal metastases, as well as to evaluate its correlation with clinico-pathological parameters. In total, 194 treatment naive paired EOC and peritoneal metastasis were analyzed by immunohistochemistry for PD-L1 expression. Clinico-pathological information was available for all patients. Significant differences in PD-L1 expression were found between primary EOC and peritoneal metastasis (p<0.0001). We found discordant tumor cell PD-L1 expression between primary tumors and corresponding peritoneal metastasis in 34% (66/194) of cases. Furthermore, PD-L1 expression in peritoneal metastasis samples was significantly associated with adverse prognostic factors, such as high proliferative index (Ki67) (p=0.0039) and high histologic grade (p=0.0330). In conclusion, the discordance of PD-L1 expression between primary EOC and corresponding peritoneal metastases suggests that its assessment as a potential biomarker for predicting response to anti-PD-L1 therapy may require analysis of metastatic lesions.