As doctors, scientists, and investors try to pick apart which powerful cancer immunotherapy is the best bet for patients, there’s an emerging new tool that might clear up the fog around a whole class of medicines — if its predictive promise can be confirmed in large clinical trials.
It’s called tumor mutation burden, or TMB, and it’s essentially a measure of just how unique a patient’s cancer might be. It could also help doctors identify which patients might benefit from immunotherapies called checkpoint inhibitors.
Checkpoint inhibitors, a $10 billion group of products, have been a commercial success. But they still only work for about 20 percent of patients. Drug companies are hoping to broaden the number of patients who could benefits from checkpoint inhibitors, and that’s where TMB testing could help sort things out.
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