Developing a blood-based assay for predicting response to immune checkpoint inhibition in cancer patients

End of project summary

Main messages 

Some therapies work well in certain people but do not help other people. Doctors need a way to decide which treatment is the best option for a particular patient. We are working on developing a simple blood test to help doctors to make this decision.  

Tumours are known to release parcels of information into the blood. These parcels contain information about the tumour, which might reveal clues about the best treatment for that tumour. In this study, we aimed to develop better methods to capture these parcels and unlock the information they contain. We used new technology to measure these parcels in blood. We hoped to learn what types of clues can be gathered and work out the best methods to see these clues.  

Several interesting features could be measured. Now we understand better how to harness the technology and handle the blood samples we are testing. We are checking and improving the methods that we use, to get better quality results.

These measurements from healthy donor blood provide valuable information for the next phase of our research. We hope to apply the same methods to blood samples from people with cancer, to pick out the features and patterns that tell us more about the cancer. One day, this type of blood test might be used by doctors to make sure that each patient is given the treatment/s that are likely to work best for them.  

Key points: 

• We have shown that a new technology can be used to study features of blood in healthy people. 
• We have tested methods to measure these features of interest and compare them between different people. 
• We have worked on improving these methods and identified issues that need to be addressed in future phases of the research.  
• Next, we aim to use these methods to study the blood of cancer patients. We hope to find out whether patterns in the blood reveal clues about how best to treat a particular cancer.  
• One day, it may be possible to design a blood test, using the methods we are developing, to help choose the best treatment for a particular patient. 

Importantly, this test would require only a small amount of blood, without the need for the patient to have surgery to collect a sample of their tumour.