Predicting Immunotherapy Responses: Scientists Discover Methods to Forecast Results
Fighting Cancer with Immunotherapy: A New Frontier
Welcome to the future of cancer treatment, where the body's immune system takes center stage. Immunotherapy is a revolutionary treatment option in the battle against the disease.
While it's a promising step forward, immunotherapy doesn't work for every patient or cancer type. Researchers are on a constant quest to determine what could make immunotherapy ineffective, at least in part.
Recently, researchers at Johns Hopkins University made a breakthrough. They identified a specific subset of mutations in a cancer tumor that could indicate how receptive it will be to immunotherapy. Their findings, published in Nature Medicine, could revolutionize the way we approach immunotherapy.
Therensol, the researchers believe their discoveries will empower doctors to more accurately select patients for immunotherapy and make more accurate predictions about the treatment's outcomes.
Understanding Immunotherapy
Immunotherapy leverages the body's immune system to fight diseases, such as cancer. This is possible because cancer cells usually develop mutations, which allow them to hide from the immune system. Immunotherapy boosts the immune system's ability to locate and destroy these cancer cells.
There are various types of immunotherapy, including checkpoint inhibitors, cancer vaccines, CAR-T cell therapy, and even radiation therapy, which can strengthen the immune response.
Immunotherapy is currently used as treatment for breast cancer, melanoma, leukemia, and non-small cell lung cancer. Researchers are exploring other possibilities, such as using immunotherapy for prostate cancer, brain cancer, and ovarian cancer.
Exploring Mutations
Currently, doctors use the total number of mutations in a tumor, or tumor mutation burden (TMB), to guess how well a tumor will respond to immunotherapy.
Dr. Valsamo Anagnostou, a senior author of the Johns Hopkins study, sheds light on TMB: "Tumor mutation burden is the number of changes in the genetic material and particularly in the DNA sequence of cancer cells, known as mutations."
The researchers discovered a unique set of mutations within the overall TMB, which they referred to as "persistent mutations." These mutations are less likely to disappear as cancer progresses, allowing the tumor to remain visible to the immune system, improving immunotherapy's effectiveness.
"Persistent mutations are always there in cancer cells and these mutations may render the cancer cells continuously visible to the immune system eliciting an effective anticancer immune response," Anagnostou said.
The number of persistent mutations better identifies tumors that are more likely to respond to immunotherapy compared to overall TMB. This insight could help clinicians select patients for immunotherapy trials more accurately and predict outcomes from standard-of-care immunotherapy.
Looking Ahead
Dr. Kim Margolin, a medical oncologist, spoke with Medical News Today about the significance of the study. She noted the importance of categorizing patients by their likelihood of responding to immunotherapy, both for advanced cancer patients and those apparently disease-free after surgery.
In the not-too-distant future, high-throughput sequencing techniques may be used to study patients' mutational spectrum, allowing the prediction of patients' responses to immunotherapy.
The findings from the Johns Hopkins study hint at a future where immunotherapy will be tailored to individual patients based on their unique tumor mutations, leading to more effective and successful treatments.
- By focusing on a unique set of persistent mutations within a tumor's overall mutation burden, researchers at Johns Hopkins University aim to enhance the effectiveness of immunotherapy.
- The revolutionary discoveries made by the Johns Hopkins team could potentially enable healthcare professionals to more accurately select patients for immunotherapy and predict the treatment's outcomes, tailoring immunotherapy to individual patients.
- In the future, high-throughput sequencing techniques might be utilized to analyze a patient's mutational spectrum, thereby permitting predictions about their response to immunotherapy, paving the way for more successful and personalized treatment plans.
