Radiation is emerging as an important tool in helping improve immune response in cancer, Elizabeth Tracey reports

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When cancer develops resistance to immunotherapy, radiation may help. That’s according to a study by cancer researcher Valsamo Anagnostou at Johns Hopkins.

Anagnostou: We’re administering radiation as a sensitizer for immunotherapy and as the way to circumvent primary resistance to immunotherapy. The dosage of radiation administered and the cohort that we've studied was very, very similar as full stereotactic radiation to the radiation administered for therapeutic purposes. So it's not higher dose, it's a well tolerated dose and that's certainly what we saw in the cohort of the clinical trial. The anti tumor immune response is specific. It targets the cancer. :32

Anagnostou says previous research showed that the microenvironment around tumors lacked cells involved in the immune response when resistance was seen. Radiation treatment results in immune cells migrating to those areas to take up the fight. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.