Researchers at the Broad Institute and Memorial Sloan Kettering have identified a previously unknown category of tumor surface proteins that function as immunotherapy targets in cancer types that have historically been resistant to checkpoint inhibitor treatments. The discovery, published in Nature this week, opens potential treatment avenues for pancreatic cancer, certain brain tumors, and ovarian cancer, which together account for more than 100,000 US deaths annually without effective systemic treatment options.
The research team developed a novel computational approach to identifying these targets by analyzing the immune cell infiltration patterns of thousands of tumor samples across cancer types. The method represents a genuine advance in the field's ability to identify which tumors are immunologically visible and therefore potentially responsive to immunotherapy, a classification that currently requires expensive and time-consuming diagnostic procedures that are not available in most clinical settings.
