In a recent study, researchers at the Francis Crick Institute, The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust and UCL, found immune cell patterns within tumours that can help predict if patients with kidney cancer will respond to immunotherapy.
In their study, published in Cancer Cell today, the scientists analysed 115 tumour samples from 15 people with metastatic clear cell renal cell carcinoma who received the immunotherapy drug nivolumab through the ADAPTeR clinical trial.
“Analysing multiple samples from each patient, both from different parts of the kidney tumour and from tumours that have spread to other organs, is critically important. It’s known that molecular information in kidney cancer is distributed like a mosaic within the tumour, and research fellow in the Cancer Dynamics Laboratory at the Crick.
They took tumour samples at various stages of cancer treatment: before immunotherapy, nine weeks after treatment started, after surgery when the tumour was removed, and if the treatment stopped working. For three individuals, tumour samples were also collected after the patient had died. This was enabled through the PEACE post-mortem research programme which provides an opportunity to study tumours that have spread to other organs, which are not amenable to be during life.Within the samples collected, the team looked at different tumour characteristics and measures of immune response to see if any corresponded to immunotherapy. These included the number of different mutations present in the tumour at diagnosis and whether specific retroviral components, viral DNA present in the human genome, were expressed.
They found increased number of specific ‘clonal’ T cell receptors, proteins on the surface of T cells, present in the tumour before treatment, was linked to a great chance of positive immunotherapy response. And if these T cell receptors were maintained during treatment, this was an indicator that treatment would be effective.