Myelodysplastic syndrome is a type of blood cancer which currently affects more than 7,000 people in the UK.
King’s College London (KCL) has led the publication of the first ever guidelines aimed at standardising how clinicians measure immune responses in patients with hard-to-treat blood cancers.
The new guidelines will not only help identify which patients will respond to certain types of treatment, but also better classify patients based on whether their immune response is autoimmune or autoinflammatory, helping to determine treatment choices and clinical outcomes.
Myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS), which affects more than 7,000 people in the UK, is a type of blood cancer in which immature blood cells in the bone marrow do not mature or develop into healthy blood cells and die either within the bone marrow or shortly after entering the bloodstream.
Risks associated with MDS include increased chances of infection, anemia, bleeding and bruising, and it can sometimes progress to acute myeloid leukemia, a more aggressive and harder to treat form of leukemia.
New guidelines approved by the European Society of Hematology and developed by the International Integrative Immunology for MDS (i4MDS), a consortium that aims to improve understanding of the immune mechanisms underlying MDS, provide several recommendations for seven panels (a group of specific antibodies used to detect and measure different cellular markers that characterize different cell populations) to measure immune responses in MDS.
The recommendations include guidelines on flow cytometry, a powerful analytical tool that measures and analyzes the physical and chemical properties of individual cells through a beam of light, potentially reducing the need for multiple tubes and increasing the efficiency of immune profiling.
Dr Shahram Kordasti, Reader and Group Leader in Applied Cancer Immunopathology at KCL, commented: “We are pleased to be able to publish the first consensus-based guidelines on immune monitoring in MDS as part of the work of the i4MDS Consortium.
“This is an important step toward a more standardized approach to immune monitoring in MDS and subsequently more ‘immune-informed’ clinical trials for MDS patients.”
