Predicting response to adoptive cell therapies in cancer

• Recent advances in immunotherapy open the door to new approaches in cancer treatments.
• Patient variability is a major issue impairing a massive adoption of cell-based immunotherapy.
• Researchers at the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute have summarized all the previous knowledge on immunotherapy to make it easier for clinicians to dive into it.

Immunotherapy has changed the way how oncology patients are treated. Immunotherapy approaches, including the use of immunomodulatory agents to enhance anti-cancer responses and the recent development of adoptive cell therapy have improved patients’ survival rates and reduced the risk of recurrence for many cancer types.

However, many patients exhibit a lack of response to treatment, relapse and/or development of resistance, or life-threatening therapy-associated toxicities. While for pharmacological compounds in immunotherapy a set of biomarkers anticipating the patient’s response have been proposed, there is an unmet medical need for these in cellular immunotherapies such as T cells expressing chimeric antigen receptor (CAR-T), engineered T cells receptor (TCR) and tumor infiltrating leucocytes (TIL).

The group of Dr. Manel Esteller, Director of the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute, ICREA Research Professor and Chairman of Genetics at the University of Barcelona, provides this week in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute (JNCI) a perspective of our current knowledge in this area and where the field is heading, with the goal of improving the clinical benefit in patients treated with these new emerging approaches.