Immunotherapy: New horizons in cancer treatment
Immunotherapy is an innovative cancer treatment method that has redefined the way we now deal with this deadly disease.
The impact of immunotherapy on the therapeutic strategy of treating cancer is impressive, as it strengthens the patient’s immune system to recognize, deal with and destroy cancer cells.
The way that immunotherapy drugs work today is to deactivate the “brakes” of the immune system, which are usually activated in the case of cancer. With this inactivation through immunotherapy, the immune system is more activated and treats cancer more effectively.
One of the most important advantages of immunotherapy is that it causes long-term remissions of the disease in metastatic patients and that in a percentage of them it even reaches the so-called “functional cure” offering long-term immunity to cancer.
However, despite the very encouraging results, immunotherapy works in a percentage of patients and can also cause significant side effects. For this reason, the choice of immunotherapy should always be made based on the guidelines.
The efforts of researchers today, regarding immunotherapy, are to combine it either with different immunotherapy drugs or with chemotherapy or targeted therapy, resulting in a survival benefit in a larger percentage of patients or in types of cancers, in which it has not been effective to date.
One such example is prostate cancer, where a few days ago at the 20th American Society of Genitourinary Oncology (ASCO-GU) in San Francisco, CONTAC-02 was announced, the first positive study of a combination of immunotherapy and targeted therapy in patients with high-risk castration-resistant prostate cancer, who present with lymph node or visceral (liver, lung, etc.) metastases and who have already received treatment with a new androgen receptor signaling inhibitor.
In this international study, in which the Clinical Trials Center of the Athens Medical Center participated with great success, with Principal Investigator Dr. Marino Tsiatas, the combination of atezolizumab (an immune checkpoint inhibitor) and cabozantinib (a tyrosine kinase inhibitor) reduced the risk of relapse or death by 35%, compared to a new androgen receptor signaling inhibitor.
Overall, immunotherapy opens up new horizons in cancer treatment and offers hope to patients facing this difficult disease.
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