Research Paper|Volume 12, Issue 17|pp 17288—17294

Male patients with TERT mutation may be more likely to benefit from immunotherapy, especially for melanoma

Jia Li¹, Zhaoyan Li², Chenyue Zhang³, Chenxing Zhang⁴, Haiyong Wang⁵

¹Department of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine, Affiliated Cancer Hospital of Zhengzhou University and Henan Cancer Hospital, Zhengzhou 450008, China
²Department of Oncology, Yueyang Hospital of Integrated Traditional Chinese and Western Medicine, Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), Shanghai 200437, China
³Department of Integrated Therapy, Fudan University Shanghai Cancer Center, Shanghai Medical College, Shanghai 00032, China
⁴Department of Nephrology, Shanghai Children's Medical Center, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai 200127, China
⁵Department of Internal Medicine-Oncology, Shandong Cancer Hospital and Institute, Shandong First Medical University and Shandong Academy of Medical Sciences, Jinan 250117, China

* Equal contribution

Received: May 2, 2020Accepted: June 28, 2020Published: September 10, 2020

Copyright: © 2020 Li et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Genomic mutation may be key factors for sex-biased disparities in cancer diagnosis, prognosis and prediction of treatment response. Current study has revealed that sex-based dimorphism on the efficacy of immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) in various cancers and confirmed that male patients can benefit more from immunotherapy. However, only a subset of male patients responds well to ICIs. Therefore, biomarkers are desperately needed to identify the group of patients who may be more likely to benefit from ICIs. With the availability of the cBioPortal database, we identified that TERT mutation may serve as a sex-specific cancer biomarker and TERT mutation frequency of melanoma was higher in male patients. Notably, we found that male patients with TERT mutation may be more likely to benefit from immunotherapy (p = 0.006), especially for melanoma (p < 0.001). Therefore, our research provides a possible direction for the exploration of immunotherapy prediction biomarkers based on sex difference.