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.
Subject (authority = RUETD)
Topic
Physics and Astronomy
RelatedItem (type = host)
TitleInfo
Title
Rutgers University Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Identifier (type = RULIB)
ETD
Identifier
ETD_8667
PhysicalDescription
Form (authority = gmd)
electronic resource
InternetMediaType
application/pdf
InternetMediaType
text/xml
Extent
1 online resource (viii, 64 p. : ill.)
Note (type = degree)
Ph.D.
Note (type = bibliography)
Includes bibliographical references
Subject (authority = ETD-LCSH)
Topic
Cancer--Treatment
Note (type = statement of responsibility)
by Anshuman Panda
RelatedItem (type = host)
TitleInfo
Title
School of Graduate Studies Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Identifier (type = local)
rucore10001600001
Location
PhysicalLocation (authority = marcorg); (displayLabel = Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey)
I hereby grant to the Rutgers University Libraries and to my school the non-exclusive right to archive, reproduce and distribute my thesis or dissertation, in whole or in part, and/or my abstract, in whole or in part, in and from an electronic format, subject to the release date subsequently stipulated in this submittal form and approved by my school. I represent and stipulate that the thesis or dissertation and its abstract are my original work, that they do not infringe or violate any rights of others, and that I make these grants as the sole owner of the rights to my thesis or dissertation and its abstract. I represent that I have obtained written permissions, when necessary, from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis or dissertation and will supply copies of such upon request by my school. I acknowledge that RU ETD and my school will not distribute my thesis or dissertation or its abstract if, in their reasonable judgment, they believe all such rights have not been secured. I acknowledge that I retain ownership rights to the copyright of my work. I also retain the right to use all or part of this thesis or dissertation in future works, such as articles or books.