Harnessing the power of the immune system to destroy cancer has dominated the biotech industry over the past decade. And for good reason: CAR-T therapies, checkpoint inhibitors, oncolytic viruses, and other next-generation immunotherapies can be incredibly effective at treating cancer — in some patients.
That last phrase is the big caveat of immuno-oncology therapies: They don’t work in everyone, but only in very specific subsets of patients. While a promising way to make these therapies work in broader patient populations is to combine different immuno-oncology therapies, we first need to understand which patients will respond to treatment and why.
In general, checkpoint inhibitor therapies that block PD-1 and PD-L1 proteins and unleash the immune system on cancerous cells are effective in only 20% to 30% of patients, with values ranging from zero to 80% depending on the indication. A recent study in JAMA estimated that only about 12% of patients responded favorably to checkpoint inhibitor drugs in 2018.
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