Travera reposted this
Why does knowing about your immune system health matter when you are considering cancer immunotherapies, especially immune checkpoint inhibitors? - Not all patients respond equally to immune checkpoint inhibitors. Currently, only about 20% of patients receiving these drugs experience a durable clinical benefit. - Understanding your immune system's baseline fitness can help predict whether you're likely to respond to a specific immunotherapy drug. - It can guide personalized treatment decisions, such as choosing between different checkpoint inhibitor drugs, deciding whether to combine drugs, and determining whether to continue or discontinue a particular therapy. - It provides insights beyond traditional tumor-based biomarkers by assessing the functional capacity of your immune system to mount an effective response against cancer. - It can help avoid unnecessary treatments with expensive drugs that are unlikely to be effective for your specific immune profile, potentially saving time, resources, and reducing side effects. - It could help you monitor your immune system changes by taking longitudinal blood draws and measuring T-cell physical parameters like mass, volume, and density. By taking blood samples at different time points after interventions (like supplements, exercise, or lifestyle changes), you could track how these activities impact your immune cell fitness. - Combining it with your molecular profiling and gene expression data, you can better understand the longitudinal profile of your immune system. For more, please see our conversation with Rob Kimmerling, PhD, and Dennis Watson of Travera here: https://lnkd.in/exhgqWgG