研究人员指出，携带大量突变的肿瘤更容易在癌症免疫疗法中获益，因为这些肿瘤更有可能拥有“免疫原性”突变。

Holt补充道，“我们的研究开辟了癌症免疫治疗的新途径：制造个性化的癌症疫苗，医生在线答疑，利用免疫原性突变增强机体的抗肿瘤能力。”该研究团队正在尝试将这一策略与传统的癌症治疗结合起来。

生物通推荐原文：

Neo-antigens predicted by tumor genome meta-analysis correlate with increased patient survival

Somatic missense mutations can initiate tumorogenesis and, conversely, anti-tumor cytotoxic T cell (CTL) responses. Tumor genome analysis has revealed extreme heterogeneity among tumor missense mutation profiles, but their relevance to tumor immunology and patient outcomes has awaited comprehensive evaluation. Here, for 515 patients from six tumor sites, we used RNA-seq data from The Cancer Genome Atlas to identify mutations that are predicted to be immunogenic in that they yielded mutational epitopes presented by the MHC proteins encoded by each patient’s autologous HLA-A alleles. Mutational epitopes were associated with increased patient survival. Moreover, the corresponding tumors had higher CTL content, inferred from CD8A gene expression, and elevated expression of the CTL exhaustion markers PDCD1 and CTLA4. Mutational epitopes were very scarce in tumors without evidence of CTL infiltration. These findings suggest that the abundance of predicted immunogenic mutations may be useful for identifying patients likely to benefit from checkpoint blockade and related immunotherapies.