A study found that assessment of TROP2 expression among patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) by quantitative continuous scoring (QSC), a fully supervised computational pathology algorithm, is reproducible across pathologists and serves as a robust approach for the real-world setting.

These data will be presented by Fernando Lopez-Rios, MD, PhD, Hospital Universitario 12 de Octubre, Madrid, Spain, at the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC) 2025 World Conference on Lung Cancer in Barcelona, Spain.

According to Dr Lopez-Rios et al, assessing TROP2 expression by conventional methods is challenging, while QCS has “demonstrated the ability to predict NSCLC patient response to a TROP2 targeting antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) by quantifying TROP2 protein expression on digitized IHC slides.”

There were 64 commercial samples of NSCLC included in this study. The slides were stained and qualified via the TROP2 (EPR20043) NSCLC NMR research-use-only algorithm and then analyzed with the algorithm by 30 pathologists across 9 global sites and 1 internal Roche laboratory. Pathologists received training in the algorithm and then utilized the algorithm to generate normalized membrane ratio (TROP2-NMR). The overall percent agreement, positive percent agreement, and negative percent agreement were calculated to determine algorithm reproducibility. 

Across all 10 sites, the positive percent agreement was 99.9%, negative percent agreement was 100.0%, and overall percent agreement was 99.9%. All agreement measures were similarly high when compared among individual readers, and when compared among only the 9 external sites (excluding the Roche laboratory).

Dr Lopez Rios et al concluded this data “demonstrate that the QCS assessment of TROP2 expression is highly reproducible across pathologists,” while noting that this methodology requires "pathologist input” which “could introduce variability.” They went on to comment, “the consistency observed confirms the robustness of this fully-supervised approach in real-world settings.”

Source:

Lopez-Rios F, Inge LJ, Blechet C, et al. Real-world assessment of TROP2-NMR by quantitative continuous scoring (QCS) in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Presented at 2025 World Conference on Lung Cancer. September 6-9, 2025; Barcelona, Spain. Abstract OA09.03