Lung cancer cell, credit: Anne Weston, EM STP - ’Lung cell’, credit: Anne Weston. EM STP, The Francis Crick Institute
Lung cancer cell , credit: Anne Weston, EM STP - 'Lung cell', credit: Anne Weston. EM STP, The Francis Crick Institute - Scientists at UCL, the Francis Crick Institute, and the Cancer Research UK Lung Cancer Centre of Excellence, have identified genetic changes in tumours which could be used to predict if immunotherapy drugs would be effective in individual patients. Immunotherapies have led to huge progress treating certain types of cancer, but only a subset of patients respond, and hence a challenge for doctors and researchers is understanding why they work in some people and not others, and predicting who will respond well to treatment. In their paper, published in Cell , the scientists looked for genetic and gene expression changes in tumours in over 1,000 patients being treated with checkpoint inhibitors, a type of immunotherapy which stops cancer cells from switching off the body's immune response*. They found that the total number of genetic mutations which are present in every cancer cell in a patient was the best predictor for tumour response to immunotherapy. The more mutations present in every tumour cell, the more likely they were to work. In addition, expression of gene CXCL9 was found to be a critical driver of an effective anti-tumour immune response.
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