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Currently, it is difficult for clinicians to decide which patients will respond to immunotherapy and, therefore, what is the best course of treatment for patients with metastatic renal cell carcinoma (RCC). A recent study published in Oncoimmunology describes a combination of two potential biomarkers that may help predict response to immunotherapy for metastatic RCC patients, but further research is needed to see if these findings can be applied in practice.
Fifty-six patients with metastatic RCC were treated with nivolumab and included in the study. The investigators categorised the tumours into poorly proliferated (62.5%), moderately proliferative (30.4%), and highly proliferative (8.9%).
They found that the response rate was significantly lower among patients who had PD-L1 negative and poorly proliferated tumours (6.5%) than among those with PD-L1 negative and moderately proliferative tumours (30%).
The findings are preliminary because of the small number of patients included in the study. More research is needed to determine whether the 2 measures could be used as biomarkers in practice.
