New pathologic scoring system could help predict survival in lung cancer patients

Reviewed by Lily Ramsey, LLMNov 6 2023 A new pathologic scoring system that accurately assesses how much lung tumor is left after a patient receives presurgical cancer treatments can be used to predict survival, according to new research led by investigators at the Bloomberg~Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center and the Mark Foundation Center for Advanced Genomics and Imaging at the Johns Hopkins University.

Immunotherapies harness a patient's immune system to target their tumors. These powerful drugs are often paired with conventional chemotherapies to help shrink a patient's tumors before surgery, increasing the likelihood of successfully eliminating the cancer. To gauge treatment success, oncologists typically rely on radiologic imaging of the remaining tumor, but the results aren't always as accurate in early-stage tumors as they are for more advanced cancers.

As a result, they were able to separate patients into three groups based on how much tumor was left. In the future, data such as these may help guide the next round of clinical trials and ultimately help oncologists decide how to treat individuals in these subgroups, Deutsch says. For example, patients with no tumor left may be able to skip postsurgical immunotherapy or have a relatively limited amount, while individuals in the intermediate group may need to continue immunotherapy for longer.

"The common features seen across these multiple tumor types means that pathologists don't have to switch to different scoring systems for assessing pathologic response. This is similar to what already exists in radiology, where the RECIST system is used across all tumor types for determining objective response to therapy," Taube says, noting that pathologists already are completing the necessary workflows as part of standard procedures when assessing surgically removed tumors.

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