{"doi":"10.1101/2025.06.27.661875","title":"Pan-cancer prediction of tumor immune activation and response to immune checkpoint blockade from tumor transcriptomics and histopathology","abstract":"Accurately predicting which patients will respond to immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) remains a major challenge. Here, we present TIME_ACT, an unsupervised 66-gene transcriptomic signature of tumor immune activation derived from TCGA melanoma data. First, TIME_ACT scores accurately identify tumors with activated immune microenvironments across cancer types. Analysis of spatial features of the tumor microenvironment revealed that TIME_ACT-high regions exhibit dense lymphocyte infiltration near tumor cells, indicating localized immune activation. Second, in 15 anti-PD1 transcriptomic cohorts spanning six cancer types, TIME_ACT outperforms 22 established signatures and methods, achieving a mean AUC of 0.76 and a clinically meaningful mean odds ratio of 6.11. Thirdly, TIME_ACT scores can be accurately inferred from tumor histopathology slides. Finally, slide-inferred TIME_ACT scores predict ICB response across eight unseen cohorts, achieving a mean AUC of 0.72 and a mean odds ratio of 5.02. These findings establish TIME_ACT as a robust, pan-cancer, and low-cost predictor of ICB response.","journal":"bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)","year":2025,"id":569365,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9254,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2025-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":770681,"name":"Sumeet Patiyal","orcid":"0000-0003-1358-292X","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":678765,"name":"Lipika R. 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