Researchers at The Tisch Cancer Institute at Mount Sinai, in collaboration with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK), have developed an exciting new tool that could change the way cancer patients are treated. The tool, called SCORPIO, uses artificial intelligence (AI) to predict how well cancer patients will respond to a type of treatment called immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs).
Not only does SCORPIO rely on widely available and affordable routine blood tests, but it also consistently outperforms existing Federal Drug Administration-approved biomarkers, such as tumor mutational burden (TMB) and PD-L1 immunostaining, in predicting patient responses to immune checkpoint inhibitors. This sets a new benchmark for precision oncology tools.
Diego Chowell, PhD, Assistant Professor of Immunology and Immunotherapy, Oncological Sciences, and Artificial Intelligence and Human Health, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, led the study. It was titled “Prediction of checkpoint inhibitor immunotherapy efficacy for cancer using routine blood tests and clinical data” and published on January 6 in the journal Nature Medicine.