Study Discovers That Autoantibodies in Patients Could Boost Cancer Immunotherapy
For years, oncologists have been baffled by why checkpoint inhibitors work for some cancer patients and not others. This challenge has made it difficult for these immunotherapies to be widely used since it isn’t easy to predict who will benefit and yet the treatments are currently very expensive. Now a new study whose findings appeared in the journal Nature has found that autoantibodies, the proteins known to drive autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, could be the missing link that helps checkpoint inhibitors to be more effective against different kinds of cancer and other diseases. Doctor Aaron Ring, the…