By Admin at 23 Oct 2017, 15:56 PM

Immunotherapy treatments that harness a person’s own immune system to fight cancer are among the most exciting advances in cancer care, and a series of events has them slated to gain even more momentum. At a meeting of the American Association of Cancer Research in Boston, Dr. Steven Rosenberg, researcher and chief of surgery at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) reported on the first patient with metastatic breast cancer to be essentially cured following immunotherapy treatment.

The treatments began in 2015, during which her immune cells were harvested, “intensified” and infused back into her body. Two years later she is disease-free. Speaking with The Wall Street Journal, Rosenberg said, “We now see this treatment as a blueprint. We’ve taken the first steps in treatment of these common solid-tumor cancers that don’t respond to anything."1

It’s not a fool-proof treatment, and it doesn’t work every time, but Rosenberg and colleagues are actively working on using immunotherapy treatments to target cancers of the breast, colon and bile duct. “Each patient is a puzzle,” Rosenberg said. “Our hypothesis is that immunotherapies work because they target unique mutations in that person’s cancer." 2 One of the goals of NCI’s Cancer Moonshot initiative is to bring successful immunotherapy treatment to more patients, faster.

Toward that end, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has partnered with 11 biopharmaceutical companies to launch the $215 million Partnership for Accelerating Cancer Therapies (PACT). The five-year collaboration is intended to identify, develop and validate biomarkers (markers of disease and treatment response) to advance new immunotherapy treatments, according to NIH. NIH Director Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D. said in a news release:3

“We have seen dramatic responses from immunotherapy, often eradicating cancer completely for some cancer patients. We need to bring that kind of success — and hope — for more people and more types of cancers, and we need to do it quickly. A systematic approach like PACT will help us to achieve success faster.”

Adding to the momentum, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is expected to approve Kite Pharma’s immunotherapy drug axi-cel to treat non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and approved another immunotherapy drug, Novartis’ Kymriah, to treat children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, in August 2017. 4 Both are chimeric antigen receptor, or CAR-T, treatments, in which immune cells are genetically engineered to produce CARs on their surface, which allow the immune cells to recognize an antigen on targeted tumor cells.5

Taken together, it’s hoped that immunotherapy treatments will continue to progress and offer hope to cancer patients when other treatments fail or stop working. Speaking about CAR-T and other immunotherapy treatments, NCI’s Rosenberg said, “In the next few years I think we’re going to see dramatic progress and push the boundaries of what many people thought was possible with these adoptive cell transfer–based treatments."6

Sources:

1. The Wall Street Journal October 12, 2017
2. The Wall Street Journal October 12, 2017
3. National Institutes of Health News Release October 12, 2017
4. FiercePharma October 18, 2017
5. Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, CAR-T Cell Therapy
6. National Cancer Institute, CAR T Cells

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