When immunotherapy can work against cancer

Immunotherapy is becoming the preferred cancer treatment over chemotherapy.  It’s less devastating as it harnesses the body’s own immune response to fight the cancer—but it works in only one in five patients.

Researchers from the Institute for Research in Biomedicine in Barcelona wanted to find out why it works only for some patients, and not others.

For one, it works better on some cancers than others, but the researchers say it isn’t just the type of cancer but the characteristics of the cancer cells themselves that can determine immunotherapy’s effectiveness.

They tracked the response of 1,491 cancer patients to CPIs—checkpoint inhibitors—one of the most common immunotherapy treatments and discovered there were five factors that identify the cancer cells that are more likely to respond to immunotherapy.  The factors—TMB (tumour mutational burden), effective T-cell infiltration, TGF-B activity, previous treatment and the tumour’s growth potential—form the profile of the patient most likely to benefit from the therapy.

Up to now, people with specific cancers have been assigned to immunotherapy, but it’s more to do with the five biomarkers that can help select the patient more likely to be helped, the researchers say.

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