Cancer cell mutation levels may predict the effectiveness of immunotherapy

, published online January 15, showed that mutation levels in cancer cells were associated with survival after patients were treated with checkpoint inhibitors. The study believes that this phenomenon is prevalent in many types of cancer and may therefore help predict which patients will respond well to this immunotherapy. The paper is published in Nature Genetics.
immune checkpoint inhibitors are used to prevent specific cancer cells from suppressing the body's immune response, which would have helped fight cancer. However, the effects of these immunotherapy treatments vary. Therefore, an accurate understanding of how different patients will respond to immunotherapy remains an important goal of clinical care for cancer.
Timothy Chan, David Solit, Luc Morris and colleagues at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, USA, and colleagues evaluated clinical and genomic data from a large number of patients with advanced cancer, of whom 1,662 were treated with immunosuployment inhibitors and another 5,371 were not treated.
researchers sequenced cancer-related genes in tumors in metastatic cancer patients and quantified the extent of tumor mutations in each patient ("tumor mutation load"). It was found that patients with a wide range of tumor mutations had higher overall survival rates after receiving immunotherapy with checkpoint inhibitors. However, the level of mutation thresholds associated with increased survival does not seem to be the same for different types of cancer.
findings suggest that tumor mutation loads may be a useful indicator for predicting the response of patients with different types of cancer to checkpoint inhibitor immunotherapy. (Source: Tang Erdu, China Science Daily)