Protein biomarkers in plasma: revealing biological insights into tumor microenvironment

Immunotherapy has become a pillar of cancer treatment, although the majority of patients treated with immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) do not generate durable treatment responses, acquire resistance or are limited by treatment-related toxicities.

There is a critical need to identify early non-invasive biomarkers of response and to improve our understanding of the mechanisms that drive treatment failure. Due to the complex relationship between the host immune response and biology of tumors, multiomic approaches are often required to understand the molecular basis for non-response to ICB. Blood plasma proteomic analyses allows longitudinal assessment of the immune system activation and real-time monitoring of the treatment dynamics.

Leveraging proteins in circulation with single-cell RNA-sequencing data of tumor biopsies can generate further biological insight into the tumor-intrinsic response to immunotherapy. In this webinar, two respected scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital, Genevieve Boland and Arnav Mehta explain how an extensive plasma proteomic analysis revealed biological insights about the tumor microenvironment in melanoma patients after immune checkpoint blockade and helped them to identify composite biomarkers to better predict sensitivity and response to immunotherapy.

Speakers

• Genevieve Boland, Surgical Oncology, Massachusetts General Hospital
• Arnav Mehta, Postdoctoral Researcher, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard