Liquid biopsies come of age offering unexploited potential to monitor and react to tumor evolution. We developed a cost-effective assay to non-invasively determine the immune status of glioblastoma (GBM) patients. Employing newly developed printed peptide microarrays we assessed the B-cell response against tumor-associated antigens (TAAs) in 214 patients. Firstly, sera of long-term (36+ months, LTS, n=10) and short-term (6-10 months, STS, n=14) surviving patients were screened for prognostic antibodies against 1745 13-mer peptides covering known TAAs (TNC, EGFR, GLEA2, PHF3, FABP5, MAGEA3). Next, survival associations were investigated in two retrospective independent multicenter validation sets (n=61, n=129, all IDH1-wildtype). Reliability of measurements was tested using a second array technology (spotted arrays). LTS/STS screening analyses identified 106 differential antibody responses. Evaluating the Top30 peptides in validation set 1 revealed three prognostic peptides. Prediction of TNC peptide VCEDGFTGPDCAE was confirmed in a second set (p=0.043, HR=0.66 [0.44-0.99]) and was unrelated to TNC protein expression. Median signals of printed arrays correlated with pre-synthesized spotted microarrays (p<0.0002, R=0.33). Multiple survival analysis revealed independence of age, gender, KPI and MGMT status. We present a novel peptide microarray immune assay that identified increased anti-TNC VCEDGFTGPDCAE serum antibody titer as a promising non-invasive biomarker for prolonged survival.
Keywords: TNC; antibodies; glioblastoma; long-term survival; non-invasive biomarker; serum.