Immunotherapy is one of the newest cancer treatment options that has made it possible for physicians to target and treat cancer more effectively. This treatment works by helping a patient’s immune system to kill cancer cells rather than using pharmaceuticals or radiation therapy to directly fight the cancer cells.
Immunotherapy typically has fewer side effects compared to other cancer treatment options, and it can be used on cancers such as skin cancer, which don’t respond well to other treatments, including chemotherapy, and it may prevent cancer from returning by boosting the immune system’s ability to fight cancer cells.
However, immunotherapies aren’t universal cancer treatments because they aren’t effective with every type of cancer and every cancer patient. As such, scientists are still carrying out research to identify why immunotherapy isn’t always effective with every cancer patient and type of cancer.
In the meantime, researchers from Maryland-based Johns Hopkins University have devised a way to accurately forecast how a tumor will respond to immunotherapy. The researchers discovered a subset of cancer tumor mutations that could point to how a cancer tumor will respond to immunotherapy. They believe that this discovery could allow doctors to select people for immunotherapy treatment more accurately and make better treatment prediction outcomes for their patients.
Cancer cells usually stay hidden from the immune system by developing mutations. Immunotherapies such as CAR-T cell therapy and monoclonal antibodies give the immune system a boost and allow them to find and destroy these hidden cancer cells. The researchers noted that physicians use the total number of cancer tumor mutations, the tumor mutation burden, to predict how a tumor will react to immunotherapy.
Dr. Valsamo Anagnostou, senior author of the study and director of the thoracic oncology biorepository, stated that cancer cells with more mutations were more visible to the immune systems because their mutations differentiated them from neighboring cells. As a result, he noted, tumors with a high tumor mutation burden tend to have longer clinical outcomes with immunotherapy.
Anagnostou and her team discovered a specific set of “persistent mutations” that are less likely to fade away over time. These mutations allow the immune system to lock onto the cancer tumor even as the cancer evolves and make it easier to target the tumor using immunotherapy. She explained that these persistent mutations made the cancer cells perpetually visible to the immune system and trigger an anti-tumor immune response, leading to sustained immunologic tumor control and better survival outcomes.
By analyzing the persistent mutation load, clinicians may be able to select patients for immunotherapy more accurately.
These findings were reported in the “Nature Medicine” journal.
As more entities such as CNS Pharmaceuticals Inc. (NASDAQ: CNSP) devote more resources to studying different cancers and how novel treatments can be developed leveraging this new information, patients could soon have superior treatments to opt for and have a better quality of life despite their cancer diagnosis.
NOTE TO INVESTORS: The latest news and updates relating to CNS Pharmaceuticals Inc. (NASDAQ: CNSP) are available in the company’s newsroom at https://ibn.fm/CNSP
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