Quantitative Assay for Immune Checkpoints Impacting the Overall Immunotherapy Market

Release Date: 07-Nov-2020

Immunotherapy and more specifically immune checkpoint inhibitors have initiated and led to the development of completely novel treatment regimen shift in case of urothelial carcinoma. Researchers have now analyzed the therapeutic value of PD-L1 in the patients suffering from urothelial carcinoma who have already undergone radical cystectomy. In the clinical research study, total of 97 patients having urothelial cancer were enrolled. The assay which was done to evaluate the expression level of PD-L1, Tumor Infiltrating Lymphocytes was Immunohistochemical staining using SP263. Also, Kaplan-Meier plots and proportional Cox hazard ratios were used to examine the relationship between the survival outcomes and the expression level of PD-L1.

Out of the 97 patients that were enrolled in the study, 19.5% of the patients were found to be having PD-L1-positive TCs and 35.5% were found to be having PD-L1-positive TILs. Also, it was detected through the use of Kaplan-Meier analyses that survival rate of the patients were not related with PD-L1-positive TCs but PD-L1-positive TILs was found to be adjoined with better recurrence-free survival (RFS; P = 0.03) and better cancer-specific survival (CSS; P = 0.02).

At the end of the clinical research study, it was reported that PD-L1-positive TILs were significant predictors of patient prognoses and positive PD-L1 expression in the patients were directly linked with tumors of high grade. Such type of quantitative assay for checking the expression of PD-L1 in different scenario is estimated to be important for the future of the cancer therapeutics industry as several hundred novel drug discoveries will be dependent on such information available in the database which will eventually save lots of time in the drug development process.