Targeted immune system–modifying therapies have seen a massive spike in attention recently—as these immunotherapies have been successful in helping patients that were intractable to other, more common treatments. Although successful, immunotherapies do not work for everyone and investigators continually seek to identify which patient populations to target. Now, researchers supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) have discovered how to better predict who will respond to the therapy and who will not. Findings from the new study were published today in Nature Medicine through an article entitled “ A Transcriptionally and Functionally Distinct PD-1 + CD8 + T Cell Pool with Predictive Potential in Non-Small-Cell Lung Cancer Treated with PD-1 Blockade .” Immunotherapy changes a patient's immune system to allow it to attack cancer cells and either destroy them or at least keep them from growing. The key is a protein known as programmed cell death protein ...
Original Article: Immunotherapy Biomarker Predicts Lung Cancer Response and Survival