Singapore develops algorithm to assess immunotherapy benefit in stomach cancer patients

Recent clinical studies indicate that patients with stomach cancer treated with a combination of immunotherapy and chemotherapy have a higher survival rate compared to those who were treated with chemotherapy alone. However, it was found that not all patients benefit from a joint immunotherapy-chemotherapy treatment. Researchers at the National University Cancer Institute, Singapore, and the Department of Medicine at NUS Medicine have identified a group of stomach cancer patients who may not benefit from undergoing joint immunotherapy-chemotherapy treatment, using a novel algorithm they developed on their own. The algorithm, called KM-Subtraction, was validated with over 500,000 simulations to demonstrate its robustness and explore its limits of error. The implementation of KM-Subtraction in these trials resulted in new findings confirming that more than 20 per cent of the patient population will not benefit from the addition of immunotherapy into chemotherapy regimen.