HBKU and Sidra Medicine study unravels genetic influence on cancer immune responsiveness
SIDRA Medicine and Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) at Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU), Qatar Foundation (QF), 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 pre-existing 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.
Immunotherapy, a therapeutic approach based on boosting the immune system, has changed the way cancer is treated, yet only a minority of patients respond to the treatment. The groundbreaking research study, published in Immunity (CellPress), one of the top scientific journals worldwide, answers a critical question that has been facing scientists over the past ten years. That is, why some patients develop a spontaneous, yet partial, anti-cancer 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 and adjunct associate professor at the College of Health and Life Sciences at HBKU, with Dr Elad Ziv, professor of Medicine at UCSF, led the research team as co-senior authors. QCRI’s Dr Mohamad Saad and UCSF’s Dr Rosalyn Sayaman, co-first authors, were the lead computational scientists, with other team members from Sidra Medicine, including Dr Wouter Hendrickx Jessica Roelands, Dr ounes Mokrab and Najeeb Syed. The immunogenomic analytic approach used in the study to dissect tumour-host interplay was also implemented as a part of one Qatar National Research Fund’s National Priorities Research Program project.
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. Having identified several variants in genes of which the immunological functions are not known, the team is hopeful that studying these genes in detail might lead to the identification of novel therapeutic targets.
Dr 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 anti-cancer immune response. Translating these findings into clinical practice to develop personalised immunotherapeutic approaches accounting for patients’ genetic fingerprints represents the next challenge.”