By Admin at 22 Aug 2016, 10:36 AM

Certain types of immunotherapy drugs have been making significant impacts on cancer treatments since 2011, and five years later they are still a large force in making aggressive and hard-to-treat cancers beatable.

Immunotherapy is a cancer treatment designed to boost the immune system in order to fight cancer in three different ways: preventing the growth of cancer cells, preventing the spread of cancer cells, and helping the immune system kill cancer cells.

Cancer cells trick the immune system by sending signals at checkpoints telling the immune system they are not harmful. Immunotherapy drugs act as “checkpoint inhibitors,” meaning they reveal the deceitful cancer cells. The drugs intercept the cancer cells’ signals, allowing the immune system to attack and kill the cancer cells.

There are different immunotherapy drugs for different types of cancer. The U.S Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved ipilimumab in 2011 to treat metastatic melanoma, pembroilzumab and nivolumab in 2014 to treat melanoma, and in 2015 approved pembroilzumab and nivolumab to also treat lung and kidney cancers.

This year the FDA approved two more drugs. In May nivolumab was approved to treat Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and in June atezolizumab was approved to treat urothelial carcinoma, or bladder cancer. As more research is conducted more immunotherapy drugs may be created or adjusted to treat additional cancers.

Dr. Walter Quan, chief of medical oncology and director of immunotherapy at the Cancer Treatment Centers of America in Phoenix stated:

“I think the big news for 2016 is more and more immunotherapy. Checkpoint inhibitors are going to be used in more cancers, and they are going to be used earlier in treatment.”

Many people undergoing immunotherapy don’t experience some of the nasty side effects that chemotherapy and radiation produce. However, that doesn’t mean everyone is side-effect free. Dr. Quan pointed out:

“Some people have no side effects at all, which is extraordinary. Some people have bad side effects, and we can't predict ahead of time who is going to get bad side effects. But other people have nothing happen, and their cancer shrinks for a number of years, or even disappears completely. And that’s the big news."

Researchers are conducting clinical trials to find out if checkpoint inhibitors work better than a combination of already-approved drugs. For instance, Dr. Glen Weiss, director of clinical research at Cancer Treatment Centers of American in Phoenix is conducting a clinical trial to test the effectiveness of nivolumab combined with chemotherapy drugs when treating colorectal and pancreatic cancers.

There is another clinical trial in which the effectiveness of pembrolizumab combined with trastuzumab to treat breast and gastric cancers is being studied.

Dr. Weiss stated:

“There are a number of cancers where it is expected that immunotherapy will work, and by ‘work,’ I mean leading to dramatic responses and durable responses where those tumors have shrunk or have held stable for months, if not years."

Sources:
Cancer Treatment Centers of America July 25, 2016
ClinicalTrials.gov December, 2015
ClinicalTrials.gov December, 2015
Cancer.net July 25, 2016
Cancer Research Institute July 25, 2016

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