University of Pittsburgh Medical Center researchers found a way to predict when a rare eye cancer will respond to treatment, The Washington Post reported April 22.
The study, published in Nature Communications, involved patients with metastatic uveal melanoma, an eye cancer that afflicts only 5 people in a million but that often spreads to other parts of the body.
"We chose this because it was one of the only cancers that 10 years ago when we started, there was nothing approved for it," Udai Kammula, MD, lead author and director of the Solid Tumor Cell Therapy Program at UPMC Hillman Cancer Center in Pittsburgh, told the Post.
Dr. Kammula and his team have had some success treating uveal melanoma using adoptive cell therapy, which involves removing the T-cells from the tumor and proliferating them in a lab before they are infused into the body. The treatment partially or completely shrunk tumors in only about 35% of patients, however.
In order to determine why the treatment didn't work in the majority of patients, researchers took samples from 100 different uveal melanoma tumors that had spread to different parts of the body in 84 patients. They found 2,394 genes that could help make tumors susceptible to treatment, identified shared characteristics, and created biomarkers that are "extremely good" in predicting when treatment will be effective.
The biomarker is now being evaluated in a trial involving 30 patients, according to the Post.