What does your immune response have to do with brain tumors? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Your immune system has everything to do with how your body responds to cancer, and brain tumors are no exception. A new test aims to assess that along with characterizing the tumor itself. Chetan Bettegowda, director of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins and one of the test’s developers, explains.

Bettegowda: We know that cancers and tumors elicit a response from the immune system. We have treatments that use the immune system to attack cancer cells and we know the responsiveness of tumors is in part based on these complex interactions. This is one of the earliest if not the first integrated test that allows the simultaneous understanding of what's happening to tumor material by looking at DNA as well as looking at the immune cells that are in that compartment, and we were excited to be able to marry these two very important items.                  :34

Bettegowda says the test will also be able to monitor the impact of treatment. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.