A noninvasive blood test may help clinicians identify “adverse events related to treatment with immune checkpoint inhibitor drugs.”
The researchers “measured cell-free DNA to identify tissue damage to nine organs in a study involving 14 patients with solid tumors who received immune checkpoint inhibitor therapy, a treatment that helps boost the immune system’s ability to attack cancer. The test determined that the six patients in the cohort who had immune-related adverse events (irAEs) – such as inflammation in the lung and gastrointestinal tract – had evidence of tissue damage in multiple organs at the time of, or prior to, their irAE diagnoses, based on symptoms.”
Around half of patients who receive immunotherapies “develop serious immune-related adverse events, and these can be life-threatening,” but they have been hard to predict. The population in this study included six patients with irAEs and eight patients without. Tissue damage was determined to “precede the clinical diagnosis of irAE in three of the six patients by a range of four to 236 days. By contrast, none of the eight patients without clinically documented irAEs had evidence of multiorgan damage.”
A larger trial is still needed to determine “how causes of multiorgan damage affect the release of cell-free DNA.”
