Dataset Information

Immune Checkpoint Inhibitors: A Promising Choice for Endometrial Cancer Patients?

ABSTRACT: Although around 80% of endometrial cancers are diagnosed at early stages and present with a 5-year survival rate exceeding 95%, patients with advanced and recurrent disease show a poor prognosis and low response rates to standard chemotherapy. In the era of targeted therapy, the great advances in the understanding of programmed death-ligand 1 (PD-L1) upregulation in cancer cells, which is responsible for tumor immune escape, have contributed to the increasing interest in immune checkpoint inhibitors as a promising strategy for the treatment of several refractory solid malignancies, including endometrial cancer. Several clinical trials have investigated the efficacy and safety of immune checkpoint inhibitors in endometrial cancer, which already led to the approval of the anti-programmed cell death protein 1 (anti-PD-1) antibody pembrolizumab as a satisfactory alternative for selected patients with unresectable or metastatic disease. As the future of cancer treatment will probably rely on combination therapy strategies, currently, innovative ongoing trials are exploring the potential role of immune checkpoint inhibitors associated with chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and other targeted therapies. Moreover, further research is warranted to discover new specific biomarkers that can accurately predict the response to immunotherapy.

SUBMITTER: Musacchio L

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7356971 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Immune Checkpoint Inhibitors: A Promising Choice for Endometrial Cancer Patients?

Musacchio Lucia L Boccia Serena Maria SM Caruso Giuseppe G Santangelo Giusi G Fischetti Margherita M Tomao Federica F Perniola Giorgia G Palaia Innocenza I Muzii Ludovico L Pignata Sandro S Benedetti Panici Pierluigi P Di Donato Violante V

Journal of clinical medicine 20200603 6

Although around 80% of endometrial cancers are diagnosed at early stages and present with a 5-year survival rate exceeding 95%, patients with advanced and recurrent disease show a poor prognosis and low response rates to standard chemotherapy. In the era of targeted therapy, the great advances in the understanding of programmed death-ligand 1 (PD-L1) upregulation in cancer cells, which is responsible for tumor immune escape, have contributed to the increasing interest in immune checkpoint inhibi ...[more]

PMID: 32503218

Similar Datasets

Project description:Immunotherapy has emerged as the fifth pillar of cancer treatment alongside surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy, and targeted therapy. Immune checkpoint inhibitors are the current superheroes of immunotherapy, unleashing a patient's own immune cells to kill tumors and revolutionizing cancer treatment in a variety of cancers. Although breast cancer was historically believed to be immunologically silent, treatment with immune checkpoint inhibitors has been shown to induce modest responses in metastatic breast cancer. Given the inherent heterogeneity of breast tumors, this raised the question whether certain breast tumors might benefit more from immune-based interventions and which cancer cell-intrinsic and/or microenvironmental factors define the likelihood of inducing a potent and durable anti-tumor immune response. In this review, we will focus on triple negative breast cancer as immunogenic breast cancer subtype, and specifically discuss the relevance of tumor mutational burden, the plethora and diversity of tumor infiltrating immune cells in addition to the immunoscore, the presence of immune checkpoint expression, and the microbiome in defining immune checkpoint blockade response. We will highlight the current immune checkpoint inhibitor treatment options, either as monotherapy or in combination with standard-of-care treatment modalities such as chemotherapy and targeted therapy. In addition, we will look into the potential of immunotherapy-based combination strategies using immune checkpoint inhibitors to enhance both innate and adaptive immune responses, or to establish a more immune favorable environment for cancer vaccines. Finally, the review will address the need for unambiguous predictive biomarkers as one of the main challenges of immune checkpoint blockade. To conclude, the potential of immune checkpoint blockade for triple negative breast cancer treatment could be enhanced by exploration of aforementioned factors and treatment strategies thereby providing promising future prospects.

Project description:The severe acute respiratory syndrome associated coronavirus‑2 (SARS‑CoV‑2) poses a threat to human life worldwide. Since early March, 2020, coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‑19), characterized by an acute and often severe form of pneumonia, has been declared a pandemic. This has led to a boom in biomedical research studies at all stages of the pipeline, from the in vitro to the clinical phase. In line with this global effort, known drugs, currently used for the treatment of other pathologies, including antivirals, immunomodulating compounds and antibodies, are currently used off‑label for the treatment of COVID‑19, in association with the supportive standard care. Yet, no effective treatments have been identified. A new hope stems from medical oncology and relies on the use of immune‑checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs). In particular, amongst the ICIs, antibodies able to block the programmed death‑1 (PD‑1)/PD ligand-1 (PD‑L1) pathway have revealed a hidden potential. In fact, patients with severe and critical COVID‑19, even prior to the appearance of acute respiratory distress syndrome, exhibit lymphocytopenia and suffer from T‑cell exhaustion, which may lead to viral sepsis and an increased mortality rate. It has been observed that cancer patients, who usually are immunocompromised, may restore their anti‑tumoral immune response when treated with ICIs. Moreover, viral-infected mice and humans, exhibit a T‑cell exhaustion, which is also observed following SARS‑CoV‑2 infection. Importantly, when treated with anti‑PD‑1 and anti‑PD‑L1 antibodies, they restore their T‑cell competence and efficiently counteract the viral infection. Based on these observations, four clinical trials are currently open, to examine the efficacy of anti‑PD‑1 antibody administration to both cancer and non‑cancer individuals affected by COVID‑19. The results may prove the hypothesis that restoring exhausted T‑cells may be a winning strategy to beat SARS‑CoV‑2 infection.

Dataset Information

Immune Checkpoint Inhibitors: A Promising Choice for Endometrial Cancer Patients?

Publications

Immune Checkpoint Inhibitors: A Promising Choice for Endometrial Cancer Patients?

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets