Scientists from the National Oncological Research Center (CNIO) of Spain have discovered biomarkers who predict which patients will not respond to chemotherapy and have created a company to validate technology in a hospital environment.
The use of these biomarkers in clinical practice would allow to avoid the side effects of chemotherapy and apply a more effective treatment, CNIO researchers have underlined, who today publish the results of their work in the journal Nature Genetics.
Chemotherapy seeks to end tumor cells through drugs, and it has been a habitual treatment against cancer for decades, although it does not always give good result, the CNIO recalled in a note spread today.
Chemotherapies are good for some patients, but they are not effective in all cases, since between 20 and 50 percent of cancer patients do not respond to these drugs, ”explained Geoff MacIntyre, head of the CNIO computational oncology group, and said that these patients will suffer the side effects caused by chemotherapy without obtaining any clinical benefit.
The team led by MacIntyre, in collaboration with the University of Cambridge and the emerging company Tailor Bio, has developed a method that predicts in which patients will not be effective Standard treatments with chemotherapies frequently, based on platinum compounds, taxa and anthracyclines.
“We have found a way to do precision medicine with standard chemotherapies,” said MacIntyre, who has worked with researchers Joe Sneath Thompson and Barbara Hernando, Cnio, and Laura Madrid, from Tailor Bio, as first authors.
The study introduces biomarkers that allow the stratification of patients when multiple chemotherapies not originally developed as directed therapies are used, ”they have described in the journal Nature Genetics.
Researchers have explained that they have developed a genomic test that allows three standard chemotherapies to be used in a directed manner, in patients who know they can respond to them; The test can be applied to different types of cancer And the first results point out that they could benefit thousands of patients.
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Recognize each tumor for alterations in chromosomes
The method is based on the fact that many tumors accumulate alterations or changes in the number of chromosomes of their cells, and a consequence, said Laura Madrid, is that cancer cells do not have the amount of adequate genetic material.
These alterations are different in each tumor, so that its set forms a characteristic pattern, a ‘chromosomal instability firm’, and the study published today develops biomarkers based on those firms that allow to detect which patients are going to be resistant to those treatments to be able to choose other alternatives and more effective.
The precise use of chemotherapy It benefits not only patients, but the system as a whole, since by reducing expenditure on ineffective therapies, and in treating complications related to the side effects of therapy, it decreases health expenditure.
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Validated with data from more than 800 patients
The CNIO team has already tested its biomarkers with an emulated essay – with existing data – and resorted to a large amount of data from cancer patients who had already been treated with the chemotherapies analyzed in the study.
Specifically, the group used data from 840 patients with different types of cancer (Mama, prostate, ovary and sarcoma) to demonstrate the effectiveness of the resistance biomarkers that they propose before one of the three types of chemotherapy evaluated – based on platinum, taxa and anthracyclines compounds.
This study has been carried out with the support of the Carlos III Health Institute, the Ministry of Science and Innovation, the United Kingdom Research Cancer and the “La Caixa” Foundation.
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Test to take this technology to the clinic
To bring this knowledge to the clinic, the technology developed by CNIO researchers has to be validated now in a hospital environment and the group has already received financing from the Ministry for digital transformation and public function.
This project, in collaboration with the company that emerged from the Tailor Bio research and the University Hospital 12 de Octubre, will evaluate the integration of technology into the health system analyzing samples already available of patientsand demonstrate that technology can be ready to be used in clinical trials in 2026.
(With EFE information)
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