Commentary
Immunotherapy has been approved for treating hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), but biomarker-based stratification of patients for optimal response to therapy is an unmet need.
In preclinical models of NASH-induced HCC, therapeutic immunotherapy targeted at programmed death-1 (PD1) did not lead to tumour regression. This indicates that tumour immune surveillance was impaired. Immune surveillance is the concept that the immune system recognises developing cancer cells as “foreign” and thus eliminates them.
D. Pfister et al. (German Cancer Research Center, Germany) found that non-viral HCC, and particularly NASH-HCC, might be less responsive to immunotherapy, probably owing to NASH-related aberrant T cell activation causing tissue damage that leads to impaired immune surveillance.
