2026 Volume 34 Issue 1 Pages 1-14
Introduction: Therapists must select the best treatment appropriate for the patient. We conducted clinical trials to identify potential human leukocyte antigens (HLAs) in response to cancer treatment.
Patients and Methods: We recruited participants (n = 2,035) who had undergone resection surgery (RS) and HLA testing, had a confirmed family history (FH) of cancer, and received polysaccharide-K (PSK), fluoropyrimidine antimetabolites (FA), mitomycin C (MMC), and their combination therapies as a postoperative adjuvant therapy (PAT). We classified good or poor survival peptide groups matching the human endogenous retrovirus genes (HERVs) according to therapies and FH groups. Subsequently, we assessed the HLA incidence of peptide groups between patients with good and poor survival. We investigated the overall survival of these HLA antigens. Similarly, FH groups and sex differences FH evaluated the relation to HLA-A-locus-based HLAs.
Results: We predicted how the HLAs of an individual patient responded to treatments such as RS only, FA, PSK, MMC, and their combination (MFPSK). In addition, we investigated how the HLA antigens of an individual patient did not respond to RS only. In particular, positive for the HLA-A2 related to good response to FA, PSK, MMC, and MFPSK, while poor response to RS only.
Conclusion: We confirmed the clinical significance of HLA testing; however, this depended on the association with peptides, sex, and their FH. These associations enabled the prediction of treatment response, in particular, the response or non-response to RS only, which was never achieved even by other genomic sciences.
