Head, neck cancer treatment can be improved by immunotherapy drug, says study
Ohio, March 6: The survival rates for head and neck cancer patients with intermediate-risk features can be increased by adding an immunotherapy drug to the standard of care treatment regimens, suggests a recent study conducted by the University of Cincinnati.
The study, which was led by Trisha Wise-Draper, MD, has been published in 'Clinical Cancer Research', a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.
According to the lead author of the study, the trial focused on adding a drug, pembrolizumab, to patients' typical standard care of treatments.
Pembrolizumab, which is sold under the brand name Keytruda, is an antibody used in cancer immunotherapy that treats a variety of cancers, like head and neck. The drug works by blocking a pair of receptors that normally turn off the human immune system once it has completed its task of fighting off a foreign substance that causes diseases.
"Once the virus or infection is cleared, you have to have a way to turn your own immune system off, to tell it that the infection is gone and it's time to calm down," Wise-Draper added.
Tumour cells have figured out how to turn on the receptors that turn off the immune system, preventing immune cells from detecting tumour cells as foreign things that the body should fight. Pembrolizumab, on the other hand, prevents the interaction and maintains immune cells functioning, allowing them to target cancerous cells as they should.
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The drug has been developed as a treatment for a variety of cancers, and Wise-Draper stated that it has shown early success as a treatment for head and neck cancers that have spread or returned after initial treatment, with early studies reporting effectiveness for about 20 per cent of patients treated.
"And although we're careful to say cure, it does result in what is called 'durable responses,'" she added, explaining that means patients have a good response to treatment much longer than expected, sometimes for years, "which was a huge advancement over chemotherapy where they may have only been effective for say nine to 10 months at most," the author stated.
According to Wise-Draper, patients with head and neck cancer who are treated with standard surgery, radiation, and sometimes chemotherapy if risk factors warrant it see their cancers return roughly 30% to 50% of the time.
"So instead of waiting for them to come back, could we try to prevent them from coming back? If cancer came back, they were much harder to cure the second time and had a lot of failure in that group," she said, adding "So we asked if we could add this immunotherapy, the pembrolizumab, and decrease that risk of cancer coming back."
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-PTC News
