Until recently, researchers and oncologists had placed lung cancer patients into two broad categories: those who would benefit from immunotherapy, and those who likely would not. Now, researchers, using artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze simple tissue scans, say they have discovered biomarkers that could tell doctors which lung cancer patients might actually get worse from immunotherapy.

Until recently, researchers and oncologists had placed these lung cancer patients into two broad categories: those who would benefit from immunotherapy, and those who likely would not.

But a third category — patients called hyper-progressors who would actually be harmed by immunotherapy, including a shortened lifespan after treatment — has begun to emerge, said Pranjal Vaidya, a PhD student in biomedical engineering and researcher at the university’s Center for Computational Imaging and Personalized Diagnostics (CCIPD).

«This is a significant subset of patients who should potentially avoid immunotherapy entirely,» said Vaidya, first author on a 2020 paper announcing the findings in the Journal for Immunotherapy of Cancer. «Eventually, we would want this to be integrated into clinical settings, so that the doctors would have all the information needed to make the call for each individual patient.»

Ongoing research into immunotherapy

Currently, only about 20% of all cancer patients will actually benefit from immunotherapy, a treatment that differs from chemotherapy in that it uses drugs to help the immune system fight cancer, while chemotherapy uses drugs to directly kill cancer cells, according to the National Cancer Institute.

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Materials provided by Case Western Reserve University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.