Advancing personalised cancer treatment through a new blood test

Isabel Barragán

Fundación para la Investigación de Málaga en Biomedicina y Salud, Málaga, Spain

Immunotherapy, a type of cancer treatment that helps the body's own defenses fight cancer, has changed the way we treat people with advanced cancer. However, the reality is that most patients do not benefit from this treatment because their cancer cells find ways to resist. Sometimes, doctors combine immunotherapy with certain types of focused radiation, which can make the treatment more effective without significant additional adverse effects, even helping the immune system attack tumours in other parts of the body. But even with this combination, it is still very difficult for doctors to know in advance who will truly benefit and who will not.

To solve this problem, this project is focused on developing a special blood test. This test looks for special signs in the blood that can give clues about how both the patient’s immune system and the cancer are working together. By studying these patterns, the test helps doctors guess whether a person will respond well to immunotherapy, to radiation, or to both. It can also help guide new ways to treat cancer in the future.

The main goal of this work is to make treatment more personal and more precise for each patient. With this test, doctors will be able to choose the best option, avoiding treatments that will not work and the side effects that come with them. This approach can also save time and money for patients and health systems, since people will get the right treatment sooner.

In summary, this new blood test is a tool that brings hope for people with the most challenging stage of cancer. It may help doctors give each person the treatment that is best for them, improving survival and quality of life in a simple and non-invasive way.

Validation of a novel epigenetic decoding of blood DNA to predict clinical benefit of immunotherapy

Stage 2