Multifactorial stroma-mediated resistance is a major contributor to residual disease under targeted therapies in lung cancers

Despite inducing strong and durable clinical responses, targeted therapies do not eliminate advanced cancers, as a subset of tumor cells survives within residual tumors, eventually developing resistance. The ability of tumor cells to avoid therapeutic elimination can be mediated both by cell-intrinsic and microenvironmental mechanisms. Whilst the specific molecular mediators of cell-intrinsic and microenvironmental resistance are well understood, their relative contribution to in vivo therapeutic responses remains poorly defined. Using spatial histological inferences from experimental models of ALK+ NSCLC, we found that peristromal niches protected tumor cells from therapeutic elimination in vivo, enabling in vivo persistence. Whereas the development of bona fide resistance is associated with the development of the development of cell-intrinsic resistance, relapse of tumor growth reflects a combined effect of both cell-intrinsic and microenvironmental mechanisms. Mechanistically, the protective effect of the peristromal niche is not reducible to a single mechanism, instead reflecting a combined effect of multiple juxtacrine and paracrine mediators. The lack of reducibility to a single molecular mediator presents an obvious challenge to the therapeutic paradigms of targeting individual resistance mechanisms. We found that this challenge could be mitigated by shifting the therapeutic focus to orthogonal collateral sensitivities of residual tumors. Exploiting adaptive upregulation of HER2, associated with both cell-intrinsic and microenvironmental persistence, using the antibody-drug conjugate T-DXd strongly enhanced the effect of targeted therapies and suppressed the development of resistance.