FIELD: medicine.SUBSTANCE: group of inventions relates to medicine, namely, the prediction or monitoring of the future or current response of a patient suffering from cancer to a TLR-9 agonist treatment. For this purpose, the frequency of activated natural killer T (NKT) cells is determined, where the patient responding to the TLR-9 agonist treatment has a frequency of at least 3 % activated NKT cells of the whole NKT cell population. At the same time, the patient responding to treatment has a prolonged survival time without progression. Further, the TLR-9 agonist is a DNA construct from a covalently continuous, partially self-complementary DNA strand having a double-stranded stem with single-stranded end loops bearing unmethylated CG motif, wherein the DNA construct comprises at least one sequence motif NNCGNN, where NNand NNrepresent any combination of A, C, T and G, and C is deoxycytidine, G is deoxyguanosine, A is deoxyadenosine, and T is deoxythymidine. Also, the group of inventions relates to the use o
