Cancer

Dr Michael-John Devlin, Clinical Research Fellow at Queen Mary University of London, is aiming to improve prediction around which patients are likely to respond to immunotherapy treatment, following encouraging results in some patients with advanced CCOC.

So far, Dr Devlin has focused on understanding how CCOC interacts with our bodies’ immune system, in order to try and identify the mechanisms which underly an anti-cancer response, and why in some patients the cancer cells are able to evade this.

In around half of patients with CCOC, the cancer cells lose the ability to produce a protein called ARID1A. Dr Devlin and his colleagues think these patients are more likely to respond to immunotherapy. To investigate this hypothesis, they will analyse samples from 48 patients with CCOC who received immunotherapy treatment as part of a clinical trial. If the researchers are able to validate that activity surrounding the ARID1A is linked to response to treatment, they will be able to identify which patients are more or less likely to respond to this treatment. This will help to inform clinical decisions and patient choices around treatment.