Immune profile for successful cancer immunotherapy discovered

Source: Ecancer news, June 2018

In a new study published online June 25, 2018 in Nature Medicine, UC San Francisco researchers have identified a key biological pathway in human cancer patients that appears to prime the immune system for a successful response to immunotherapy drugs known as checkpoint inhibitors.

The findings, including initial observations from human tumour samples, mechanistic studies in mouse models, then confirmation in additional patient samples, could better enable clinicians to predict which patients will naturally benefit from these promising new treatments, and potentially to modify the immune response in other patients to allow more people to benefit from these therapies.