Can a new tool help determine which cancer treatments might help you? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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For many people with cancer drugs called immune checkpoint inhibitors have proven to be lifesavers. Yet as with all drugs they come with side effects, and if you aren’t a person who will benefit from them, it would be good to give them a miss. Now a new tool called Scorpio seems to help identify who might benefit from immune checkpoint inhibitors. William Nelson, director of the Kimmel Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, explains.

Nelson: A machine learning tool that they developed they call Scorpio, built and tested initially with more than 9700 cancer patients treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors, 21 different cancer types. They looked at two different sort of validation sets. In each case the Scorpio tool outperformed FDA approved predictive tools for immune checkpoint inhibition. They also then worked a large clinical trial for which there were data available and then they also outperformed those.     :28

Nelson says this is a very active area of research so he expects even better tools to be available soon. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.