At the ASCO 2021 virtual annual meeting, Dr. Antoni Ribas from UCLA, Dr. Patrick Alexander Ott from Dana Farber together with Dr. Kurt A. Schalper from Yale University teamed to discuss resistance mechanisms of checkpoint inhibitors, potential therapeutic combinations, neoantigen landscape, tumor mutational burden, and the role of tumor microenvironment in cancer immunotherapy.

Therapeutic resistance can be of two types, viz, primary resistance- wherein patients generally do not respond to therapy, and acquired resistance- where patients respond initially but still undergo disease progression.