April 02, 2025

Our work on the prediction of immunotherapy response using omics data published!

New manuscript available at Nat Com. The result of an intensive team work involving Lili Boll, Sergio Vázquez, Marta E. Camarena and Júlia Perera-Bel, among others.

We have gathered omics data from more than 700 patients to investigate the main drivers of the response to immunotherapy in bladder cancer. Paradoxically, we have found that tumors with low immune infiltration response can respond as well to the treatment as those with high immune content. This can be explained because the latter group often develops immune inhibitory mechanisms. Actually, a rare type of tumor with low immune infiltration, the neuronal subtype, was the one showing the highest response rate.

We have also identified a new marker of response to immunotherapy, the number of tumor-specific lncRNAs, which suggests that antigens derived from the non-canonical translation of small ORFs in these transcripts could trigger an immune response against the tumor.

The full article can be accessed here.