Assessing individual cancer characteristics is needed to determine resistance to new types of therapies, Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Immunotherapies hold enormous promise for treating cancers of various types, but the bad news is that while many patients may initially respond many will also become resistant. Valsamo Anagnostou, a cancer researcher at Johns Hopkins, is looking at tumor specific characteristics to help predict this outcome.

Anagnostou :What drives response and resistance to cancer immunotherapy, cancer immunotherapy being among these revolutionary approaches to treat cancer that practically activates one’s own immune system to target. So what are the specific features and characteristics in the cancer cells that and at the molecular level, DNA and RNA level, that drive response and resistance to these therapies? And you can imagine that this is important because then we can leverage these findings to inform the next generation of immunotherapies.         :30

Anagnostou notes that such assessments must be dynamic and take place at multiple timepoints as cancers undergo evolution, acquiring mutations that most definitely impact cancer treatment. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.