Biostatisticians launch Cancer-Immu data portal for predicting response
to immune checkpoint blockade immunotherapy

Date:
January 18, 2022
Source:
Vanderbilt University Medical Center
Summary:
A new data portal called Cancer-Immu established by a team of
biostatisticians can help cancer clinicians and researchers predict
which patients will respond to immune checkpoint inhibitors. With
data from 3,652 samples for 16 cancer types, Cancer-Immu is the
largest immune checkpoint blockade-related data portal for exploring
immunogenomic connections.



FULL STORY ==========================================================================
A new data portal called Cancer-Immu established by a team of Vanderbilt University Medical Center biostatisticians can help cancer clinicians
and researchers predict which patients will respond to immune checkpoint inhibitors. With data from 3,652 samples for 16 cancer types, Cancer-Immu
is the largest immune checkpoint blockade-related data portal for
exploring immunogenomic connections.


==========================================================================
The team provided details about the open-access portal in a paper
published Dec. 13 in Cancer Research. Cancer-Immu integrates large-scale multidimensional omics data, including genetic, bulk, and single-cell transcriptomic, proteomic and dynamic genomic profiles. It also integrates clinical phenotypes.

While immune checkpoint inhibitors can be lifesaving for
some patients with cancer, most patients do not respond to the
immunotherapies. Researchers are working to identify biomarkers that
predict response, and Cancer-Immu offers a comprehensive functional
portal for unraveling immune-genomic connections.

"It provides easy access to immunogenic data and empowers researchers
to translate omics datasets into biological insights and clinical applications," said Yu Shyr, PhD, chair of the Department of Biostatistics
at VUMC, Harold L.

Moses Chair in Cancer Research and one of the paper's senior
authors. According to Qi Liu, PhD, associate professor of Biostatistics
and the paper's other senior author, "Cancer-Immu covers the greatest
number of datasets and omics data types compared to existing databases
with immune checkpoint blockade response outcome." The cancer types
in the data portal include melanoma, non-small cell lung cancer,
metastatic urothelial cancer, renal cell carcinoma, bladder cancer,
glioma, colorectal cancer, head and neck cancer, esophagogastric
cancer, cancer of unknown primary cause, gastric cancer, breast cancer, hepatocellular carcinoma, prostate cancer, basal cell carcinoma and non-melanoma skin cancer.

With the Cancer-Immu portal, clinicians and researchers can
upload and analyze their own data or co-analyze with existing data simultaneously. They can use either a meta-analysis or a pan-cancer
analysis. The portal has collections of three types of omics data:
genetic, transcriptomics and single cell data. The pan-cancer module,
which aggregates multiple datasets into one, enhances the detection
and analysis of rare features. The biostatisticians noted in the study
that while meta-analysis -- the statistical evaluation of independent
studies focused on the same question -- failed to detect significant
gene mutations, the pan-cancer analysis, which is a more expansive
evaluation across multiple cancer types, detected 182 genes with mutations significantly associated with immune checkpoint inhibitors.

"Cancer-Immu helps address a lack and a challenge for evaluation of
efficacy of known biomarkers and the discovery of new signatures," said
the study's first author, Jing Yang, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the
Shyr Research Lab.

The research that led to the establishment of Cancer-Immu was supported
by the National Cancer Institute with SPORE in Gastrointestinal Cancer,
SPORE in Breast Cancer, and Cancer Center Support Grant funding.

========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by
Vanderbilt_University_Medical_Center. Original written by Tom
Wilemon. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Jing Yang, Shilin Zhao, Jing Wang, Quanhu Sheng, Qi Liu, Yu
Shyr. A pan-
cancer immunogenomic atlas for immune checkpoint blockade
immunotherapy.

Cancer Research, 2021; canres.2335.2021 DOI:
10.1158/0008-5472.CAN-21- 2335 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/01/220118123623.htm

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