Predicting Immunotherapy Success: Scientists Discover Methods to Forecast Outcomes
Year after year, brilliant minds worldwide strive to establish novel treatment options against the pernicious enemy known as cancer. One of the latest combatants in this tireless battle is immunotherapy. But, like a choosy connoisseur, not all cancers or individuals respond favorably to this treatment.
In an attempt to unravel the mystery, researchers from Johns Hopkins University have made a groundbreaking discovery. They pinpointed a specific subset of mutations in cancer tumors that acts as a beacon, illuminating the tumor's susceptibility to immunotherapy.
Doctors have already been attempting to predict a tumor's response to immunotherapy using the total number of mutations in a tumor – known as the tumor mutation burden (TMB). This approach, however, has its limitations. Now, these researchers believe their findings will empower doctors to select patients more accurately for immunotherapy treatments and anticipate the treatment's outcomes more effectively.
Published in the prestigious journal Nature Medicine, their work suggests that instead of relying solely on the overall TMB, doctors should focus on the persistence of specific mutations within the tumor. These persistent mutations are less likely to disappear as the cancer evolves, allowing the tumor to remain visible to the immune system, thereby improving the response to immunotherapy.
Termed "persistent mutations," these mutations influence the immune system to mount a relentless attack on cancer cells, resulting in sustained, and potentially long-term, tumor control. Analogous to a skilled hunter tracking down an elusive prey, persistent mutations function as the trailblazers, enabling the immune system to pursue the cancer cells continuously and effectively.
In other words, persistent mutations may serve as a more reliable indicator of a cancer tumor's disposition to respond to immune checkpoint blockade, a type of immunotherapy, compared to the overall TMB. As a result, these findings could pave the way for more precise cancer patient selection in clinical trials of innovative immunotherapies or prediction of patient outcomes with regular immune checkpoint blockade treatments.
Medical News Today reached out to Dr. Kim Margolin, a medical oncologist and medical director of the Saint John's Cancer Institute Melanoma Program at Providence Saint John's Health Center in California, for her perspective.
According to Margolin, the researchers in this study have revolutionized the understanding of persistent mutations, mutation-associated neo-antigens, and their role in fueling an efficient anticancer immune response. Immunotherapies, particularly immune checkpoint-blocking antibodies, serve to intensify and amplify this immune response. In the near future, high-throughput, next-generation sequencing techniques could be leveraged to examine a patient's mutational spectrum, effectively categorizing them by their likelihood of response to immunotherapy or their potential benefits from other therapies.
This marks an exciting milestone in the ongoing effort to combat cancer, paving the way for more efficient patient selection processes and, hopefully, increased survival rates.
- The Johns Hopkins University researchers found that a specific subset of persistent mutations in cancer tumors could act as a beacon, illuminating the tumor's susceptibility to immunotherapy.
- Doctors, in the future, could use high-throughput, next-generation sequencing techniques to examine a patient's mutational spectrum, thereby potentially categorizing them by their likelihood of response to immunotherapy.
- The discovery of persistent mutations could revolutionize the understanding of immunotherapy and fuel an efficient anticancer immune response, potentially leading to increased survival rates.
