TY - JOUR TI - Biomarkers of response to immune checkpoint therapy DO - https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T3CF9T9C PY - 2018 AB - Immune checkpoint therapy leads to durable objective response in a subset of patients with metastatic cancer in many different cancer types, but the mechanisms and biomarkers of response to immune checkpoint therapy is not fully understood. Through pan-cancer analysis of the Cancer Genome Atlas, I have so far identified 2 types of predictors of immune activation and checkpoint pathway upregulation in a total of 10 solid cancer types (skin melanoma, lung adenocarcinoma, colon, endometrial, gastric, cervical, ER+ HER2− breast, bladder, clear-cell kidney, and head-neck squamous-cell cancer): (1) hyper-mutation in tumor due to DNA proofreading defect (Chapter 2) or some other etiologies (Chapter 3), and (2) expression of exogenous (Chapter 4) or endogenous (Chapter 5) viral RNA in tumor. I also validated these predictors as biomarkers of response to immune checkpoint therapy in some of the above 10 cancer types where I had access to good quality data, using published datasets of patients treated with immune checkpoint therapy for retrospective validation, and de-identified data of patients treated with immune checkpoint therapy at the Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey and the Vanderbilt Ingram Cancer Center for prospective validation. KW - Physics and Astronomy KW - Cancer--Treatment LA - eng ER -