Genomic and experimental evidence that alternate transcription initiation of the Anaplastic Lymphoma Kinase (ALK) kinase domain does not predict single agent sensitivity to ALK inhibitors

Genomic data can facilitate personalized treatment decisions by enabling therapeutic hypotheses in individual patients. Conditional selection, which includes mutual exclusivity, is a signal that has been empirically useful for identifying mutations that may be sensitive to single agent targeted therapies. However, a low mutation frequency can underpower this signal for rare variants and prevent robust conclusions from genomic data. We develop a resampling based method for the direct pairwise comparison of conditional selection between sets of gene pairs. This effectively creates positive control guideposts of mutual exclusivity in known driver genes that normalizes differences in mutation abundance. We applied this method to a transcript variant of anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK) in melanoma, termed ALKATI, which has been the subject of a recent controversy in the literature. We reproduced some of the original cell transformation experiments, performed rescue experiments, and analyzed drug response data to revisit the original ALKATI findings. We found that ALKATI is not as mutually exclusive with BRAF or NRAS as BRAF and NRAS genes are with each other. We performed in vitro transformation assays and rescue assays that suggested that alternative transcript initiation in ALK is not likely to be sufficient for cellular transformation or growth and it does not predict single agent therapeutic dependency. Our work strongly disfavors the role of ALKATI as a targetable oncogenic driver that might be sensitive to single agent ALK treatment. The progress of other experimental agents in late-stage melanoma and our experimental and computational re-analysis led us to conclude that further single agent testing of ALK inhibitors in patients with ALKATI should be limited to cases where no other treatment hypotheses can be identified.