# Immunotherapy response and its prediction

Source: https://onco.cc/terms/immunotherapy-response/  
OnCo record `immunotherapy-response` (Term). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

Immunotherapy response means whether a patient's cancer shrinks or stays controlled when the immune system is unleashed; predicting who will respond is one of the hardest open problems in cancer AI.

## Summary

Cancer immunotherapy stimulates the immune system to treat cancer (Wikipedia). Only a minority of patients respond to checkpoint inhibitors, and the approved predictors (PD-L1 staining, mismatch repair deficiency, tumour mutational burden) are imperfect, so pathology and multimodal foundation models are trained to predict benefit from slides, sequencing and clinical data; MUSK reported such a task. Response is defined by imaging criteria at set time points, which makes the label noisy.

## Fields

- Kind: Term
- Last checked: 2026-09-24
- Also known as: immunotherapy response; response to immunotherapy; checkpoint inhibitor response; immunotherapy responder; IO response prediction
- Tags: cansim-terms

## Notes

- Listed in the CanSim terms map 1.0.0 (docs/onco/terms.json, generated 2026-09-24), CC BY 4.0, attribution: CanSim project, an open, public-data-first cancer foundation-model programme; CanSim page path /terms/immunotherapy-response.

## Sources

- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer_immunotherapy
- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer_immunotherapy

## Connected records

- targets: [PD-L1](https://onco.cc/targets/pdl1/)
- terms: [Biomarker](https://onco.cc/terms/biomarker/), [Cancer AI vocabulary (CanSim terms map)](https://onco.cc/terms/cancer-ai-vocabulary/), [Tertiary lymphoid structures (TLS)](https://onco.cc/terms/tertiary-lymphoid-structures/), [Tumour mutational burden (TMB)](https://onco.cc/terms/tmb/)
- technologies: [Immune checkpoint inhibitors](https://onco.cc/technologies/checkpoint-inhibitor/), [MUSK (Stanford, vision-language pathology)](https://onco.cc/technologies/musk/)

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JSON: https://onco.cc/api/v1/entities/immunotherapy-response.json