Glioblastoma brain tumors are especially perplexing. Inevitably lethal, the tumors occasionally respond to new immunotherapies after they've grown back, enabling up to 20% of patients to live well beyond predicted survival times.
What causes this effect has long been the pursuit of researchers hoping to harness immunotherapies to extend more lives.
New insights from a research team provide potential answers. The team found that recurring glioblastoma tumors with very few mutations are far more vulnerable to immunotherapies than similar tumors with an abundance of mutations.
The finding, appearing in the journal Nature Communications, could serve as a predictive biomarker to help clinicians target immunotherapies to those tumors most likely to respond. It could also potentially lead to new approaches that create the conditions necessary for immunotherapies to be more effective.
"It's been frustrating that glioblastoma is incurable and we've had limited progress improving survival despite many promising approaches," said senior author.
"We've had some success with several different immunotherapies, including the poliovirus therapy developed at Duke," the author said. "And while it's encouraging that a subset of patients who do well when the therapies are used to treat recurrent tumors, about 80% of patients still die."
The authors performed genomic analyses of recurrent glioblastoma tumors from patients treated with the poliovirus therapy as well as others who received so-called checkpoint inhibitors, a form of therapy that releases the immune system to attack tumors.
In both treatment groups, patients with recurrent glioblastomas whose tumors had few mutations survived longer than the patients with highly mutated tumors. This was only true, however, for patients with recurrent tumors, not for patients with newly diagnosed disease who had not yet received treatment.
"This suggests that chemotherapy, which is the standard of care for newly diagnosed glioblastoma, might be altering the inflammatory response in these tumors," the author said, adding that chemotherapy could be serving an important role as a primer to trigger an evolution of the inflammation process in recurrent tumors.
The finding in glioblastoma could also be relevant to other types of tumors, including kidney and pancreatic cancers, which have similarly shown a correlation between low tumor mutations and improved response to immunotherapies.
https://corporate.dukehealth.org/news/recurrent-gbm-brain-tumors-few-mutations-respond-best-immunotherapy
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-20469-6
http://sciencemission.com/site/index.php?page=news&type=view&id=publications%2Fvery-low-mutation&filter=22
Recurrent GBM brain tumors with few mutations respond best to immunotherapy
- 1,448 views
- Added
Edited
Latest News
Ancient viral DNA in the hu…
By newseditor
Posted 26 May
AI to analyze clumping prot…
By newseditor
Posted 26 May
Reversible, non-hormonal ma…
By newseditor
Posted 26 May
Dissection of the schizophr…
By newseditor
Posted 26 May
Protease action on controll…
By newseditor
Posted 25 May
Other Top Stories
Autism genes are in all of us, new research reveals
Read more
Genetic link between renal birth defects and congenital heart disease
Read more
Creation of minimal cell with just the genes needed for independent…
Read more
Mechanism for passing on epigenetic memories
Read more
Inherited gene changes take years off life expectancy
Read more
Protocols
SEMORE: SEgmentation and MO…
By newseditor
Posted 26 May
Spatially resolved lipidomi…
By newseditor
Posted 24 May
Efficient expansion and CRI…
By newseditor
Posted 21 May
Massively parallel in vivo…
By newseditor
Posted 20 May
Breast cancer-on-chip for p…
By newseditor
Posted 16 May
Publications
Integrating human endogenou…
By newseditor
Posted 26 May
The thalamic reticular nucl…
By newseditor
Posted 26 May
PMI-controlled mannose meta…
By newseditor
Posted 26 May
Protein-membrane interactio…
By newseditor
Posted 26 May
Toward an interventional sc…
By newseditor
Posted 26 May
Presentations
Hydrogels in Drug Delivery
By newseditor
Posted 12 Apr
Lipids
By newseditor
Posted 31 Dec
Cell biology of carbohydrat…
By newseditor
Posted 29 Nov
RNA interference (RNAi)
By newseditor
Posted 23 Oct
RNA structure and functions
By newseditor
Posted 19 Oct
Posters
A chemical biology/modular…
By newseditor
Posted 22 Aug
Single-molecule covalent ma…
By newseditor
Posted 04 Jul
ASCO-2020-HEALTH SERVICES R…
By newseditor
Posted 23 Mar
ASCO-2020-HEAD AND NECK CANCER
By newseditor
Posted 23 Mar
ASCO-2020-GENITOURINARY CAN…
By newseditor
Posted 23 Mar