Predicting Immunotherapy Responses: New Strategies Uncovered by Scientists for Better Patient Prognosis
New and Improved Way to Predict Cancer Response to Immunotherapy
Keep your eyes peeled, cancer patients! A novel approach has been developed to predict a tumor's responsiveness to immunotherapy, potentially revolutionizing treatments.
Cancer research is always pushing the boundaries, and immunotherapy is a new and groundbreaking treatment. However, not everyone and every cancer type can benefit from this treatment. The search for factors that make immunotherapy successful continues.
Researchers from Johns Hopkins University offer a promising lead. They've found a specific set of mutations in cancer tumors that could indicate how receptive a tumor will be to immunotherapy. This discovery could lead to improved patient selection for immunotherapy and a more accurate prediction of treatment outcomes.
The results of their study were published in the renowned journal, Nature Medicine.
Boosting the Immune System's Power
Immunotherapy utilizes the body's immune system to fight the disease. Typically, cancer cells develop mutations that help them evade the immune system's detection. Immunotherapy gives the immune system a much-needed boost, helping it find and destroy the cancer cells.
Immunotherapy has been used to treat various types of cancer such as breast cancer, melanoma, leukemia, and non-small cell lung cancer. Researchers are exploring its potential for other types, including prostate cancer, brain cancer, and ovarian cancer.
Mutations and Immunotherapy: What's the Connection?
Currently, doctors use the total number of mutations in a tumor, known as the tumor mutational burden (TMB), to try to determine its response to immunotherapy. According to Dr. Valsamo Anagnostou, a senior author of the study and an associate professor of oncology at Johns Hopkins, "Tumor mutation burden is the number of changes in the genetic material and particularly in the DNA sequence of cancer cells, known as mutations."
In this study, Anagnostou and her team discovered a specific subset of mutations within the overall TMB, which they called "persistent mutations." These mutations remain in cancer cells and make them consistently visible to the immune system, improving the response to immunotherapy.
This study could pave the way for more accurate patient selection and better predictions of treatment outcomes using immunotherapy.
The Future of Immunotherapy
Medical News Today spoke with Dr. Kim Margolin, a medical oncologist, about this study. She expressed enthusiasm about the findings, stating, "Persistent mutations and mutation-associated neo-antigens that are efficiently presented by the patient's own complement of MHC molecules and recognized by the patient's own complement of T-cells, likely the most important determinants of an effective anticancer immune response."
As research in this field progresses, it is likely that in the future, high-throughput, next-generation sequencing techniques will be used to study patients' mutational spectrum. This categorization may predict patients' likelihood of response to immunotherapy or benefit from other therapies.
[1] https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/newscenter/news/johns-hopkins-researchers-find-specific-subset-of-cancer-tumor-mutations-that-predict-immunotherapy-response[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6353209/[3] https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-020-01578-x[4] https://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/79/18/5454
- This discovery of specific mutations in cancer tumors, termed "persistent mutations," could revolutionize the selection of patients for immunotherapy, as these mutations improve a tumor's responsiveness to immunotherapy.
- In the future, health-and-wellness specialists may rely on high-throughput, next-generation sequencing techniques to study patients' mutational spectrum, predicting their likelihood of response to immunotherapy or other medical-conditions treatments.
- This study's findings highlight the crucial role of immunotherapy in cancer treatment, leveraging the power of the immune system to combat health-and-wellness issues like cancer, particularly by targeting persistent mutations in tumors.
