Opinion: Predicting immunotherapy success: We’ve mastered the foothills but the summit lies ahead
Every increment of progress in immunotherapy is important, but our understanding of the massively complex human immune system remains incomplete.
The Nobel Prize-winning discovery of immune checkpoint inhibitors has changed how cancer is treated. These drugs “unblock” the immune system’s normally protective pathways that prevent T cells from overreacting and potentially harming healthy cells. Immune checkpoint inhibitors work by “uninhibiting” a cancer patient’s T cells to attack his or her tumor.
While successful checkpoint therapy indicates that an individual’s immune system can control tumor growth as though the tumor is a viral infection, not. A new based on the unique genomic characteristics of an individual’s cancer, recently , has been proposed to reduce the number of treatment failures by predicting the outcome of checkpoint therapy.
