Leveraging T Cells and Artificial Intelligence in Pancreatic Cancer Therapy

Gregory L. Beatty, MD, PhD, during a conversation with CancerNetwork®, highlighted the importance of T cells and stressed the need to make them more effective in patients who have been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

Beatty, director of Translational Research at the University of Pennsylvania Pancreatic Cancer Research Center and director of the Penn-Incyte Alliance, spoke at the 15th Annual Ruesch Symposium about using immunotherapy for patients with pancreatic cancer. He said that the inflammation that normally happens in the setting of pancreatic cancer can reduce the health and fitness of T cells, which can make it more difficult for patients to combat their disease.

When asked about the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) in the future of pancreatic cancer treatment, Beatty mentioned the complex nature of the tumors and how it can be difficult to identify groups of patients based on biomarkers. He believes AI can help alleviate this problem by stratifying patients into subsets that can make it easier to decide the right type of treatment. He also believes AI might be able to inform physicians when a treatment is no longer working or when it’s a good time to start a new treatment.

Transcript:

We need to find a way to make T cells more effective in patients with pancreatic cancer, [but] there are a number of barriers to this. We think that inflammation that occurs in the setting of cancer and is prominent in pancreatic cancer tends to reduce the health and the fitness of T cells in patients, making it potentially harder to harness their ability to attack pancreatic cancer. One of the things that we need to focus on is, how do we overcome that barrier and improve the fitness of T cells so that they can be functional and effectively survey, find, and spark immune responses against pancreatic cancer?

One of the things here is that I don’t believe that there’s going to necessarily be any 1 factor, [or 1 biomarker] that’s going to be important here; it’s a group of biomarkers. How you put those together is going to be important for identifying these subsets of patients who are potentially more responsive to a particular treatment. AI can help us to try to figure out how to stratify and create these subsets of patients with pancreatic cancer. AI also has the potential to inform us about when patients may no longer be responding to treatments and when [it might be the right timing to introduce] a new treatment.

Reference

Beatty GL.The promise of immunotherapy in pancreatic cancer amidst a landscape of precision medicine. Presented at the 15th Annual Ruesch Center Symposium; November 21-23, 2024; Washington, DC.