Researchers from Severance Hospital have found a diagnostic technique that can help predict which lung cancer patients will benefit from targeted immunotherapies, the hospital said Monday.

The research team led by Cho Byoung-chul from Severance Hospital's Lung Cancer Center and Im Seock-ah from Seoul National University Hospital's Department of Internal Medicine carried out their joint research on developing a technique to accurately examine interactions between proteins extracted from the patient's biopsy.

The study aimed to examine how cancer cell alterations rewire cellular signaling pathways by changing protein-protein interaction (PPI) patterns. Understanding these PPI patterns may help develop customized therapies for cancer patients, the researchers said.

The researchers highlighted that they developed a precision diagnostic method based on PPIs that does away with the use of DNA mutations to determine who should get anticancer target treatment.

“Our approach might help predict responses to targeted cancer therapies, particularly for cancers that lack actionable genomic mutations,” the researchers wrote.

Specifically, the paper showed that the single-molecule pull-down and single-molecule co-immunoprecipitation (co-IP) techniques could characterize human epidermal growth-factor receptor (EGFR/HER) family signaling complexes in specific cancers.

The study results were published in the international journal Nature Biomedical Engineering under the title of “Profiling of protein-protein interactions via single-molecule techniques predicts the dependence of cancers on growth-factor receptors.”

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