Predicting how brain cancer responds to immunotherapy non-invasively

The analysis of immune system cells in the cerebrospinal fluid can characterise and identify the types of cerebral metastasis that could respond to immunotherapy treatments.

A study led by VHIO together with the Centro Nacional de Análisis Genómico (CNAG-CRG) and published in Nature Communications has shown that these cells have similar characteristics to cells present in cerebral metastases. That means they can act as markers to predict the response to immunotherapy.

It is the first time the characterization of immune system cells from the cerebrospinal fluid have been studied as a non-invasive method of predicting the response to immunotherapy of patients with cerebral metastases.

Cerebral metastases are the most common brain tumor – a devastating complication of melanoma and lung, breast and other cancers. Their heterogeneity and the difficulty in locating them make dealing with these patients much more difficult.

“Personalized transcriptome sequencing provides unprecedented high resolution for detecting and monitoring various types of disease. Identifying T cell clones both in the metastasis and in the fluid biopsy is of particular interest. We showed that the sequencing of the T cell receptor provides a cellular bar code that can be evaluated outside the tumor. This opens up new ways of detecting cancer more systematically,” says Holger Heyn, Group Leader at the CNAG-CRG and coauthor of the study.

You can read the original news story on the VHIO website.