A recent study, carried out by researchers from the National Cancer Institute (part of the NIH) and several other universities, outlines a potential new method of predicting whether immune checkpoint inhibitor treatments will be effective for an individual with melanoma. For more information, you can read the source article here, at the National Cancer Institute website.
About Melanoma
Melanoma is a type of skin cancer that is believed to typically be caused by exposure to UV light from the sun. According to Cancer Research UK, there are several types of melanoma, including superficial spreading melanoma, nodular melanoma, lentigo maligna melanoma, acral lentiginous melanoma, and others. Although melanoma most often occurs on areas that have had a lot of sun exposure (such as the legs or back), it can originate anywhere.
Checkpoint inhibitors are sometimes used to treat melanoma. They are a form of immunotherapy that works by blocking proteins that prevent the immune system from fighting cancer cells. For more information about how checkpoint inhibitors work, you can watch a video about them by Cancer Research UK here.
However, checkpoint inhibitors can have significant side effects, and not all patients with melanoma are responsive to this form of therapy. Currently, it is difficult to accurately predict who will benefit from the treatment.
Predicting Checkpoint Inhibitors Effectiveness
To address this, the research team developed a potential predictor tool called IMPRES (IMmuno-PREdictive Score). To do this, they investigated differences in gene expression features between patients with neuroblastoma whose immune system caused cancer regression through an unprompted response, and patients whose cancer was non-regressing.
The utility of IMPRES was then tested using 297 samples from patients with melanoma who underwent checkpoint inhibitor therapy, which showed that the predictor could correctly identify almost all patients who responded to the treatment, and over half of those who didn’t.
The next step is to further evaluate the accuracy of IMPRES using more patient datasets, but so far the results appear to be promising, and the study authors say that it may also be possible to adapt IMPRES to other forms of cancer that can be treated using checkpoint inhibitors.
For more information, you can view the original article here.
