All Articles

The FDA has granted accelerated approval to pembrolizumab for the treatment of any solid tumor in the body with a specific genetic feature, or biomarker.

The production of antibodies is the immune system’s way of waging an attack on something threatening. Monoclonal antibodies can be designed as immunotherapies that will attach to specific proteins on cancer cells, flag them for recognition by the immune system, and thus help decimate them.

Immunotherapy drugs are being approved for the treatment of more and more cancers and are making significant improvements in the lives of many patients. As a result, it has become vital that the oncology team, and navigators in particular, educate themselves and their patients on the mechanisms and side effects of these drugs.

New research into gut bacteria may shed light on the mystery of responsiveness to immunotherapy. The multi-institutional study, presented at the 2017 ASCO-SITC Clinical Immuno-Oncology Symposium, showed that patients with metastatic melanoma who responded to anti—PD-1 agents had increased diversity of intestinal microbiome.

When combined with chemotherapy, a vaccine against the human papillomavirus type 16 (HPV16) elicited strong T-cell responsiveness and improved clinical outcomes in patients with advanced cervical cancer.

According to data presented at the 2017 ASCO-SITC Clinical Immuno-Oncology Symposium, adoptive T-cell transfer using “nonengineered” T cells is producing durable responses in heavily pretreated patients with lymphoma or multiple myeloma.

With single-agent PD-1/PD-L1 therapy, melanoma patients are achieving outcomes once thought impossible for the disease, with some responses lasting more than a decade.

In patients with stage III/IV melanoma, intratumoral injections of plasmid interleukin-12 (IL-12) via electroporation enhanced response to immune checkpoint blockade.

The advent of immunotherapy has led to durable clinical responses in a variety of malignancies, but identifying which patients will respond to treatment remains an elusive goal.