August 2020 – Immunotherapy

Laurie Adami chronicles her long fight with follicular lymphoma, including her run-in with 6 types of therapies. After losing all hope, she finally achieved complete remission with a new immunotherapy called CAR T-cell therapy, and then turned her sights on climbing Mt. Everest to raise money for cancer research.

Not sure what immunotherapy is and how it works? Read about the cellular mechanism and the various types of immunotherapies, including those that use your own immune system to destroy cancer cells. This article also addresses the side effects of immunotherapy.

Cutaneous squamous-cell carcinoma (CSCC), or skin cancer, is the second most common cancer in the United States. This article examines the results of a recent study on the first and only immunotherapy approved for patients with advanced or metastatic CSCC.

About 15% of lung cancers are small-cell lung cancer, and about one-third of those are extensive-stage small-cell lung cancer. In March 2020, the FDA approved the first immunotherapy, for use with chemotherapy, for first-line treatment of patients with extensive-stage small-cell lung cancer.

A new study was presented at the 2020 ASCO meeting that compared, for the first time, the use of immunotherapy versus chemotherapy for treating patients with metastatic colorectal cancer and microsatellite instability-high or mismatch repair-deficient abnormalities.

This article discusses findings from a clinical trial showing that Keytruda prolongs the time without disease progression in patients with relapsed or refractory classical Hodgkin lymphoma compared with the current standard of therapy.

In May 2020, the FDA approved the combination of 2 immunotherapies for patients with metastatic hepatocellular carcinoma (liver cancer) who have not received systemic therapy and cannot be treated by surgery.

In June 2020, the FDA approved a new indication for Opdivo, a PD-1 inhibitor, for the treatment of patients with unresectable advanced, recurrent, or metastatic esophageal squamous-cell carcinoma, after the use of chemotherapy.