Monitoring levels of DNA shed by tumors and circulating in the bloodstream could help doctors accurately assess how gastroesophageal cancers are responding to treatment, and potentially predict future prognosis, suggests a new study led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center and its Bloomberg~Kimmel Institute for Cancer...
Mar 19 2024Johns Hopkins Medicine Monitoring levels of DNA shed by tumors and circulating in the bloodstream could help doctors accurately assess how gastroesophageal cancers are responding to treatment, and potentially predict future prognosis, suggests a new study led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center and its Bloomberg~Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy.
Anagnostou is also leader of Precision Oncology Analytics, co-leader of the Johns Hopkins Molecular Tumor Board and co-director of the Lung Cancer Precision Medicine Center of Excellence at Johns Hopkins. "We were gratified to see tumor shrinkage at a molecular level together with the immune system flaring up and clearing the tumor," she says.
Immunotherapy has not yet been broadly effective for patients with gastroesophageal cancer. By testing new treatments in patients prior to surgery, we can make these powerful observations linking treatment-induced molecular changes with survival outcomes, thus accelerating the development of different immunotherapy approaches for our patients."
About 40% of those in the nivolumab arm and 21.4% in the combination arm had a pathological complete response, meaning there was no evidence of cancer at the time of surgery. Over half of patients in both arms had a major pathological response, meaning less than 10% of cancer cells were remaining at the time of surgery.
The study adds to a growing collection of evidence showing the value of molecular readouts like ctDNA to assess response to therapy and guide future treatment plans. For example, another recent study from Anagnostou's lab, along with a ctDNA-adaptive clinical trial led by Johns Hopkins investigators, showed that ctDNA clearance can predict the success of immunotherapy treatment in patients with advanced lung cancer.
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Circulating tumor DNA levels predict outcomes for gastroesophageal cancer treated with immunotherapyMonitoring levels of DNA shed by tumors and circulating in the bloodstream could help doctors accurately assess how gastroesophageal cancers are responding to treatment, and potentially predict future prognosis, suggests a new study led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center and its Bloomberg–Kimmel Institute for Cancer...
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