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Updated: Jun 13, 2025

Experimental Melanoma Immunotherapy Model Using Tumor Vaccination with a Hematopoietic Cytokine
Published on: February 24, 2023
Five latent factors underlie response to immunotherapy
Joseph Usset1,2,3, Axel Rosendahl Huber1,4, Maria A Andrianova1
1Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona), The Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology, Barcelona, Spain.
Abstract:
Only a subset of patients treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors (CPIs) respond to the treatment, and distinguishing responders from non-responders is a major challenge. Many proposed biomarkers of CPI response and survival probably represent alternative measurements of the same aspects of the tumor, its microenvironment or the host. Thus, we currently ignore how many truly independent biomarkers there are. With an unbiased analysis of genomics, transcriptomics and clinical data of a cohort of patients with metastatic tumors (n = 479), we discovered five orthogonal latent factors: tumor mutation burden, T cell effective infiltration, transforming growth factor-beta activity in the microenvironment, prior treatment and tumor proliferative potential. Their association with CPI response and survival was observed across all tumor types and validated across six independent cohorts (n = 1,491). These five latent factors constitute a frame of reference to organize current and future knowledge on biomarkers of CPI response and survival.
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