A positive response to therapy in a paediatric patient with a renal rhabdoid tumour has enabled researchers to identify immune cells with anti-tumour activity in this rare cancer, which affects roughly of 12 children per year in Spain and has an extremely low survival rate.

After receiving chemotherapy and radiotherapy, the patient also began immunotherapy with immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICI), a treatment that boosts the ability of lymphocytes to recognise and combat tumour cells.

For more than a year, researchers from the Centro Nacional de Análisis Genómico (CNAG), the Institute for Research in Biomedicine of Barcelona (IRB Barcelona) and Sant Joan de Déu Children´s Hospital, closely monitored the evolution of the patient’s immune system in blood samples.

The results, published in Annals of Oncology, show how cutting-edge sequencing technologies can be used to detect tumour-reactive immune cells in different tissues, particularly in blood, and how these insights could contribute to the development of personalised immune therapies.