new treatments? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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When the DNA in a cell is broken up, rearranged or there is too much of it that condition is called aneuploidy. Now a new study demonstrates that people with a high degree of aneuploidy don’t respond well to newer cancer treatments called immune checkpoint inhibitors. Kimmel Cancer director William Nelson at Johns Hopkins explains.

Nelson: What this group did is that they went back and looked at this large dataset, and said wait a minute, aneuploidy is present in most cancers, like more than 95% of them, what does aneuploidy mean? If there’s a lot aneuploidy typically means a cancer cell is ever more intransigent to almost anything we try to do to treat it, so people with a lot of aneuploidy in their cancers do poorly. What these people are saying is that in this dataset which involved people treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors aneuploidy is still bad. And in fact with a lot of aneuploidy you don’t respond as well and don’t do as well with immune checkpoint inhibitors.  :32

Nelson says more research is needed to determine how well aneuploidy predicts a lack of response to treatment. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.