Nat Med: a single anti-PD-1 treatment can predict the prognosis of melanoma patients!

February 28, 2019 / bioin / - the immune response of melanoma patients to the treatment of PD-1 will occur soon after treatment, and reactive T lymphocytes can be detected in the blood after 3 weeks But researchers don't know if this early blood based test can represent changes in the tumor microenvironment For this reason, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and other units conducted a clinical trial of new adjuvant anti-PD-1 therapy on patients with stage III / IV melanoma It was found that a adjuvant anti-PD-1 therapy before surgery can predict the clinical treatment effect of patients with surgically resectable melanoma Relevant research results were recently published in nature In medicine, it is entitled "a single dose of neoadjuvant PD-1 blockade predictions clinical outcomes in resilient Mexico" Photo source: before the start of the experiment, the researchers speculated that the recovery of immune system in tumor tissue should be detected 3 weeks after anti-PD-1 treatment, so this response will be related to disease-free survival The researchers gave 27 patients an anti-PD-1 treatment before the operation As a result, all of them detected a rapid and strong anti-tumor reaction Eight of them even experienced a complete or major pathological response, and they were all in a tumor free state This rapid pathological and clinical response is related to the accumulation of exhausted cd8t cells in the tumor at the third week, and the recovery of immune response in the blood can be detected one week after treatment Through transcription analysis, the researchers found that pre-treatment immunological signals (new auxiliary response signals) were related to the clinical benefits of patients On the contrary, there are drug resistance mechanisms in patients with relapse, including immunosuppression, mutation escape and tumor evolution This study shows that neoadjuvant anti-PD-1 therapy is effective in patients with high-risk and resectable stage III / IV melanoma At the same time, the pathological response and immunological analysis after a new adjuvant treatment can be used to predict the prognosis of patients The researchers say future research should focus on adjusting treatment based on preoperative response Reference: Alexander C Huang et al A single dose of neoadjuvant PD-1 blockade predictions clinical outcomes in reactive medicine, Nature Medicine (2019) Doi: 10.1038/s41591-019-0357-y