NIH Scientists Develop AI Tool to Predict How Cancer Patients will Respond to Immunotherapy

Researchers at USA’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) have developed an AI tool that can predict how cancer patients will respond to immunotherapy.

According to the researchers, the AI tool uses routine clinical data, such as that from a simple blood test, to predict whether someone’s cancer will respond to immune checkpoint inhibitors.

Further, the machine-learning model will help doctors determine if immunotherapy drugs effectively treat a patient’s cancer.

How Does it Work?

The study details a different kind of machine-learning model that makes predictions based on five clinical features that are routinely collected from patients.

These include a patient’s age, cancer type, history of systemic therapy, blood albumin level, and blood neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio, a marker of inflammation.

Moreover, the ML model also considers tumor mutational burden, assessed through sequencing panels.

Reportedly, the model was constructed and evaluated using data from multiple independent data sets that included 2,881 patients treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors across 18 solid tumor types.

According to NIH researchers, the model accurately predicted a patient’s likelihood of responding to an immune checkpoint inhibitor and how long they would live, both overall and before the disease returned.

Notably, the researchers said, the model was also able to identify patients with low tumor mutational burden who could still be treated effectively with immunotherapy.

The study was published on June 3, 2024, in Nature Cancer, and was led by researchers at the National Cancer Institute’s (NCI) Center for Cancer Research and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. NCI is part of the National Institutes of Health.

Further, the study was co-led by Eytan Ruppin, MD, PhD, of NCI’s Center for Cancer Research, and Luc G T Morris, MD, of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. However, the work was spearheaded by Tiangen Chang, PhD, and Yingying Cao, PhD, of Dr Ruppin’s group at NCI’s Center for Cancer Research.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH), the nation's medical research agency, includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the US Department of Health and Human Services.

NIH is the primary federal agency conducting and supporting basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and is investigating the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases.