- New research shows potential reasons as to why immunotherapy often doesn’t work for people with colon cancer.
- Researchers say people with colon cancer often experience DNA mismatch repair deficiency, which in turn leads to a high tumor mutation burden.
- They report that Immunotherapy tends to work better in clonal mutations, where all cancerous cells share the same mutation.
- More research is needed, but the data could help doctors deliver more personalized cancer therapies to their patients.
Recent research has shed new light on some of the possible reasons that immunotherapy is often ineffective for people with colon cancer.
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This process can cause tumors to mutate, a condition known as high tumor mutation burden (TMB). Both MMRd and TMB are frequently seen in people with colon cancer.
Because MMRd generates mutations, conventional wisdom says that it also generates potential new antigens and hence a positive immune response as the body is better equipped to recognize tumors.
However, researchers were surprised to find that this wasn’t necessarily the case.
“We expected that our models would show something similar to the clinic, where some mice might respond [to immunotherapy] while others wouldn’t,” explained Peter Westcott, PhD, a study author and an assistant Professor and Cancer Center Member at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. “But we saw a universality across the board that these tumors are not immunogenic, which was a very surprising result.”
This negative result opens up intriguing questions, along with potential new avenues to treating people with cancer.
If the body is primed to respond to immunotherapy because it’s accustomed to tumor mutations, why does immunotherapy fail to work with so many…
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