“With the VeloSano support, I hope I can find a platform that can predict responses to treatment early and help patients have a better quality of life,” says Yee Peng Phoon, PhD.
Co-Investigator
Co-Investigator
It comes as no surprise that cancer is hard to treat. A major challenge for healthcare professionals is administering the right treatment for a particular patient. Yee Peng Phoon, PhD, along with Jos Melenhorst, PhD, and James Isaacs, MD, hopes to develop a tool that uses biomarkers to predict a patient’s response to treatment before it even happens.
Currently, there is no standard tool used to help clinicians personalize immunotherapy treatments for melanoma, an invasive skin cancer that grows quickly and can spread to any organ. About half of melanoma patients fail to respond to treatment. Dr. Phoon, Dr. Melenhorst and Dr. Isaacs are identifying biomarkers in blood samples taken from cancer patients and hoping to better understand the baseline function of immune cells.
“Every patient is different,” says Dr. Isaacs. “This study is trying to understand each individual patient’s immune system at a more detailed level and see if that can help us understand who does and does not respond to our standard treatments.”
Blood samples are much less invasive, and they make the process easier for these researchers. “Everyone’s had a blood draw,” says Dr. Melenhorst. “For us, it’s quite easy to monitor these particular proteins of interest on a blood sample.”
Melanoma is an important disease. Though it is more treatable than other cancer types, it can still be very deadly.
“Our hope is to create predictive tools to decide which treatment regimen is suitable for a patient and hopefully will have a successful outcome,” says Dr. Phoon.
“We’re particularly grateful to people who have contributed to VeloSano because this really enables us to carry out this study and help us develop the next best therapy for patients with an unmet need,” says Dr. Melenhorst.
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