“We’ve had luck with other types of cancer in removing the brakes on the immune system to allow it to fight the tumors, but this has not been the case with glioblastoma,” said Anhua Wu, professor at the First Hospital of China Medical University in Shenyang, China, and senior study author. “If our discovery of these genes is validated in other studies, we could use this ‘gene signature’ to determine the best treatments or path of treatment.”
In the quest to identify the gene(s) involved with GBM survival, the team analyzed tumor samples fro 297patients with brain cancer. The patients were separated into those with low-grade glioma (170) and those with high-grade glioblastoma (127). Using genome sequencing, they found 322 genes that were related to the immune system. Of this, eight seemed to influence survival outcome. The eight genes were: FOXO3, IL6, IL10, ZBTB16, CCL18, AIMP1, FCGR2B, and MMP9.
From the list of eight genes, the team developed a signature profile that could classify patients as high- or low-risk. High-risk patients survived, on average, 348 days after diagnosis. This 145 days less than the low-risk patients, who survived an average of 493 days after diagnosis.
The same eight-gene signature was also validated in a larger sample of 536 glioblastoma samples. In addition, the prognostic value of these eight genes could also be extended to other forms of gliomas.
“The looming question in brain cancer research today is whether the launch of immunotherapy will help control an uncontrollable disease,” said Rifaat Bashir, a retired neurologist in Virginia and a Fellow of the American Academy of Neurology and the American Neurological Association. Bashir wrote an accompanying editorial, in which he stated: “While this study does not answer this question, it brings us one step closer to believing that one day we will be able to exploit the immune system to better treat glioblastoma.”
Additional source: American Academy of Neurology press release