Why immunotherapy works for some cancer patients but not others

A new study led by researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology suggests that whether cancer patients respond to immunotherapy may depend less on the condition of their tumors before treatment than on how the tumors’ surrounding immune environment changes during the first weeks of therapy. The research, led by Prof. Dvir Aran of the Technion’s Faculty of Biology and Henry and Marilyn Taub Faculty of Computer Science, with first author Dr. Zhongyang Lin and collaborators including Prof. Jürgen C. Becker of the German Cancer Consortium, examined why patients receiving the same immunotherapy for the same type of cancer can experience dramatically different outcomes. For some patients, tumors shrink and remain under control for years. For others, the same treatment has little or no effect. Oncologists still lack a consistently reliable way to distinguish between those patients before treatment begins.