Classical monocytes may predict response to anti-PD-1 immunotherapy
Anti-PD-1 therapy has been clinically effective against a wide range of cancers, but still only a fraction of patients achieve a durable response. Researchers have been on the hunt for biomarkers that could predict which patients are likely to respond to this therapy, and Krieg et al. may have finally found their mark. The team utilized peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) from samples from twenty patients with metastatic melanoma before and twelve weeks after the initiation anti-PD-1 immunotherapy to compare responders and non-responders. They used high-dimensional, single-cell mass cytometry with three optimized immune marker panels and several bioinformatics tools to identify differences between responders and non-responders to anti-PD-1 immunotherapy.