Even as federal health research budgets are being slashed, Duarte-based City of Hope has managed to win a grant of up to $23.7 million to researchers seeking to create a biomarker map of tumor changes that cause immunotherapy resistance in patients with a certain type of lung cancer.
The grant awarded earlier this month is going to a team at City of Hope’s Beckman Research Institute that will also test biomarker therapies for patients with non-small-cell lung cancer, the prevalent form of lung cancer with roughly 200,000 cases diagnosed in the United States each year.
A six-year clinical trial, enrolling 535 patients, will provide the cornerstone for the City of Hope project, which is part of a $142 million precision cancer therapy initiative at the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) at the federal Department of Health Services agency. This program aims to deliver customized cancer care that adapts to changes in a patient’s
disease over time.
Detailed monitoring of patients’ responses to treatment
The City of Hope researchers will collect samples and detailed data at regular intervals from patients throughout the course of treatment. They will monitor tumor trajectory and patients’ response to treatment using liquid biopsies, single-cell sequencing, radio imaging and other diagnostic tools, relying on rapid turnaround times for comprehensive tumor measurements.
The City of Hope research team is led by Ravi Salgia, chair of the department of medical oncology and therapeutics research.
“Changes in cancer may occur over time, creating resistance to immunotherapy and complicating oncologists’ ability to identify the next best treatment approach,” Salgia said in the grant announcement. “Developing a biomap that detects mutations and other alterations early and predicts a patient’s cancer trajectory will enable us to match treatments to evolving tumor biology and improve our patients’ long-term survival.”
Seeking a better biomarker toolkit
Other members of the City of Hope research team include Aritro Nath and Jyoti Malhotra. Nath said that current biomarker technology has not proven very reliable.
“Doctors have historically treated advanced non-small cell lung cancer with immune checkpoint inhibitors, he said. “The main biomarker used to select immunotherapy, however, is not very reliable, with a patient response rate of less than 40%. We don’t know why some patients become resistant to checkpoint inhibitors, and we have no good biomarkers to guide the choice of secondary treatments.”
The hope is that this round of research will lead to improved alternatives.
