A new report captures the progress and potential of immunotherapy to fight cancer a decade after the first treatment was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
“Just as the host immune system is one of the most powerful weapons against a variety of other diseases, so too can it be trained against cancer,” according to the white paper by Advanced Clinical.
The 2010 approval of Dendreon’s immuno-oncology treatment, Provenge, for advanced prostate cancer launched a new era in oncology, the paper said.
The ground broken with the development of Provenge led to many other treatments, including the inhibitors PD-1/PD-L1 and CTLA-4, which activate the body’s immune system by regulating the T-cell immune function, the report said.
“Immunotherapy of cancer has changed the way cancer patients are treated today for the most part,” Andres McAllister, chief medical officer at Swedish company BioInvent, said in the report. “There are still a few areas where that hasn’t happened yet, but it will eventually. In just a few years the treatment paradigm against lung cancer, for example, has completely changed.”
Even more progress is on the horizon.
“As advanced as the use of immuno-oncology appears to be today, there is still plenty more to learn about these medicines,” the white paper says. "One of the most pressing issues to assess is how to ensure they are as effective as they can be, which increasingly requires testing combinations of different drugs to look for synergistic effects.”
Work continues on cancer vaccines as well.
“My personal opinion is that cancer vaccines are most effective in situations where we have minimal disease, or if there is a large tumor burden that can be removed by surgery and the patient can then be rendered disease-free,” said Pavel Tyan, therapeutic area lead, oncology at Advanced Clinical. “In this latter case, vaccines would help to kill micro-metastases if there are any after the visible tumor mass has been removed."
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