(Yicai) Aug. 6 -- A team of Chinese scientists has developed a new computational framework to find candidate compounds for combination immunotherapy more efficiently, offering hope for patients with poor responses to existing therapies.

The team has applied the IGeS-BS framework to over 10,000 compounds across 13 cancer types, including liver and colon cancer, generating an immuno-response landscape to prioritize candidates with synergistic potential, according to a study published in US medical journal Cell Reports Medicine yesterday.

The IGeS-BS integrated transcriptomic data from thousands of patients who had received immunotherapy and identified 33 robust signatures predictive of immune response. It then used the signatures to define a boosting score to quantify the compound-induced changes in the tumor microenvironment, ranking compounds based on their scores to select the most likely to enhance therapy efficacy.

The team is led by Li Hong from the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health and Hu Bo from the Zhongshan Hospital affiliated to Fudan University.

Immunotherapy, especially immune checkpoint blocking therapy, is an effective tumor treatment strategy that is superior to conventional methods, and it is usually combined with other cancer drugs to enhance treatment efficacy, the scientists noted. However, finding proper combinations in most clinical trials relies on expert experience and prior knowledge, they said, but added that if computational analysis can predict synergistic drugs for ICB, it may decrease the time and increase the likelihood of discovering new drug combinations.

China's cell immunotherapy market is expected to jump 41 percent to CNY22 billion (USD3.1 billion) this year from the previous one and reach CNY125 billion (USD17.4 billion) in 2030, thanks to technological breakthroughs, according to research institute ChinaIRN.

Editor: Martin Kadiev