Low PD-L1 Immunohistochemical Expression in Invasive Urothelial Carcinoma: Insights from Histological Variants

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-966-7_5How to use a DOI?

Keywords

PD-L1; immunohistochemistry; urothelial carcinoma; histological variants; invasive carcinoma

Abstract

Programmed death-ligand 1 (PD-L1) plays a pivotal role as a biomarker in predicting therapeutic response to immune checkpoint inhibitors across several malignancies, including urothelial carcinoma. Nevertheless, its expression varies among different histological variants, particularly within populations that are underrepresented in existing literature. This study investigated PD-L1 expression using immunohistochemistry in 83 cases of invasive urothelial carcinoma. All specimens were formalin-fixed and paraffin-embedded. Histopathological subtyping adhered to standardized morphological criteria, and PD-L1 immunoreactivity was classified as either positive or negative. Only cases with definitive invasive characteristics were included in the analysis. Of the 83 cases, 3 (3.6%) demonstrated PD-L1 positivity, while 80 (96.4%) were negative. Histological variants included squamous differentiation (n = 23), glycogen-rich clear cell (n = 15), lipid-rich (n = 6), micropapillary (n = 1), and other uncommon types. Notably, all PD-L1–positive tumors exhibited squamous differentiation, whereas other variants did not express PD-L1. These results suggest a notably low prevalence of PD-L1 expression in histological variants of invasive urothelial carcinoma, with expression confined to squamous-differentiated tumors. This highlights the relevance of histologic subtyping in guiding immunotherapy decisions and underscores the need for additional molecular profiling in these variant subtypes.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Lidya Imelda Laksmi
AU  - Dhirajaya Dharma Kadar
AU  - Betty Betty
AU  - Jessy Chrestella
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/12/25
TI  - Low PD-L1 Immunohistochemical Expression in Invasive Urothelial Carcinoma: Insights from Histological Variants
BT  - Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Neuroscience, Neurology, and Psychiatry 2025 (ICONAP 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 31
EP  - 38
SN  - 2468-5739
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-966-7_5
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-966-7_5
ID  - Laksmi2025
ER  -