Clinical Research Directory

Diffusion-weighted MRI to Predict Treatment Response in Stereotactic Radiotherapy of Central Nervous System (CNS) Metastases

Stereotactic radiation therapy is an important and common method of treating brain metastases in patients with malignant disease. Today, however, there are no methods available to determine the metastasis' radiation sensitivity in advance and treatment responses can only be seen by changing of the size of the metastasis on conventional X-ray examinations, computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Changes in the size of the metastases is something that is often seen weeks / months after treatment is completed. At Lund University Hospital, a new imaging technique, diffusional variance decomposition (DIVIDE), has now been developed. With this technique, the scatter in isotropic and anisotropic diffusion can be measured for each measuring point, which provides significantly more information about the properties of the tissue compared to current methods.

Observational Study on the Sensitivity of Neoadjuvant Immunotherapy in Early Triple-Negative Breast Cancer

Studies have reported that tumors with the same immunogenic mutations may induce T cell receptor (TCR) domains with similar antigen recognition functions. By assembling the complementarity-determining region 3 (CDR3) of TCRs from RNA-seq data and correlating them with 9142 samples from TCGA data, an in-depth analysis of the TCR pool in the tumor microenvironment found a strong correlation between the CDR3 sequences of tumor-infiltrating T cells and tumor mutation burden. Fairfax et al. found that in patients responding to tumor immunotherapy, the TCR immune pool of CD8+ T cells produces many clones with extremely high abundance (exceeding 0.5%) . Cader et al. also found significant changes in the TCR immune pool of patients with Hodgkin's lymphoma responding to PD-1 tumor immunotherapy. Based on these theoretical foundations, evaluating the dynamic changes of the TCR immune pool is expected to be used to analyze the immune characteristics and changes in diseases such as malignant tumors.