In my continual education, I learned that the measure of PD-1 is an indication of likelihood of effectiveness of immunotherapy. The anecdotal belief is that immunotherapy is not a viable option for ALK or EGFR patients. Some data is emerging to contradict such belief. I viewed one of the GRACE video with the question: are there better indicator than PD-1 level. The words "mutational burden" is used. In layman's term....
*what is mutational burden? The different type of mutations one has? So if one has EGFR and then T-790 and then something else...is that 3 different mutation burden?
*as the number of mutation type increases, does PD-1 measure increases? has there been study to show correlation between the "mutation burden" and PD-1 % measures?
Reply # - June 9, 2018, 09:15 AM
Hi wadvocator,
Hi wadvocator,
Tumor mutational burden encompasses more detail than just whether one's cancer has an EGFR, ALK or T790M mutation. It's the total of all of the mutations that a tumor may have acquired over the course of its development. There are a couple of good descriptions of TMB and its potential use as a biomarker for immunotherapy here:
https://www.bms.com/assets/bms/us/en-us/pdf/Disease-State-Info/tmb-101-…
https://www.scientificamerican.com/custom-media/tumor-mutation-burden/
JimC
Forum moderator