Study by QCRI, Sidra reveals genetic influence on cancer immune responsiveness
Sidra Medicine, Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) at Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU) and Qatar Foundation led a research study with the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) that represents a significant step toward personalised cancer immunotherapeutic approaches.
The international team of cancer immunologists, computational scientists, oncologists, biologists and geneticists found that preexisting anti-cancer immunity depends heavily on a patient’s genetic background. As such, certain genetic variants that make each of us unique can also influence the way the immune system fights tumours.
The groundbreaking research study, published in Immunity (Cell Press), one of the top scientific journals worldwide, answers a critical question that has been facing scientists over the past 10 years. That is why some patients develop a spontaneous, yet partial, anticancer immunity that makes them more likely to respond to immunotherapy and whether this response is caused by genetic variation in the DNA of the patients. Dr Davide
Bedognetti, director of the Cancer Research Department at Sidra Medicine with Dr Elad Ziv, professor of Medicine at UCSF, led the research team as co-senior authors. QCRI’s Dr Mohamed Saad and UCSF’s Dr Rosalyn Sayaman, cofirst authors, were the lead computational scientists, with other team members from Sidra Medicine including Dr Wouter Hendrickx Jessica Roelands, Dr Younes Mokrab and Najeeb Syed.
The new joint research holds significant potential for further achievements. Future studies will determine whether a combined “immunogenetic score” can detect patients more likely to benefit from specific immunotherapies, for a truly personalised approach. Dr Davide Bedognetti said, “We already know that the risk of developing certain diseases such as diabetes and high blood pressure, for instance, is influenced by our own DNA, and our research indicates that this is also the case for anticancer immune response. Translating these findings into clinical practice to develop personalised immunotherapeutic approaches accounting for patients’ genetic fingerprints represents the next challenge. We are now characterising paediatric cancer patients genetically and immunologically to expand immunotherapy to this population.”
“In this study, we analysed a set of around 9,000 patients with 30 different cancer types. Considering the complexity of the interaction between cancer cells and the immune system, and the large amounts of data needed to capture them, the role of computers has become more and more important in analysing the data that leads to understanding the biological mechanism behind cancer and response to immunotherapy. As the amount and type of data will grow exponentially due to technological advances, machine learning and artificial intelligence methods will be needed to understand them and extract clinically relevant information,” Dr Saad added.