While immunotherapy is revolutionizing cancer therapy, response rates to these novel treatments are low and some patients that initially respond well end up becoming unresponsive. Scientists have been working to develop tools that can help in predicting which patients are likely to benefit from immunotherapy, and a new liquid biopsy has provided a simpler way to do just that for patients with advanced lung cancer.
According to a study that was published in the journal Clinical Cancer Research, a team at the Kimmel Cancer Research Center at Johns Hopkins together with their collaborators was able to develop a liquid biopsy that can accurately predict which patients will benefit from immunotherapy against lung cancer.
This tool was able to provide its prediction weeks before existing imaging tests are able to show whether a patient is responding well to the immunotherapy they are receiving.
The test involved drawing a blood sample from patients with advanced lung cancer. Those samples were then analyzed to find out whether fragments of tumor DNA were circulating within the blood of the patients undergoing immunotherapy.
In total, the study team obtained blood samples from 109 patients. Their tool was able to provide accurate predictions after the researchers accounted for tumor DNA resulting from the normal aging process. Without eliminating such DNA, the liquid biopsy was unable to provide accurate results or predictions.
Once the team was able to eliminate circulating tumor DNA that results from the aging process, they found that patients with detectable cancer DNA tended to experience tumor progression in about three and a half months. Overall survival for this group was 11.4 months.
In contrast, patients for whom no circulating tumor DNA was detected tended to have progression-free durations of nearly 27 months and their overall survival averaged almost 47 months.
It is notable that this tool doesn’t require clinicians to obtain tumor samples in order to conduct the test. Rather, they draw a blood sample and this removes the need for time-consuming and costly procedures to obtain tissue samples from the tumor.
By using blood samples, the researchers say their approach can be readily incorporated in any facility that treats cancer rather than being restricted to highly specialized facilities. Additionally, the approach involves obtaining blood samples 3-9 weeks after a patient commences immunotherapy.
The test therefore helps to identify individuals who will benefit and those who won’t so that treatment is discontinued for those unlikely to benefit from the therapy much sooner than would have been possible if treatment teams only relied on imaging tests that require a much longer window before accurate results can be obtained. This saves time, money and inconvenience to patients.
This tool could also be of immense value to firms like Calidi Biotherapeutics Inc. (NYSE American: CLDI) that are developing immunotherapies. By using this liquid biopsy, clinical trials can have an additional tool to screen out study participants sooner once a prediction is made that they aren’t responding to the treatment being trialed.
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