Immunotherapy
The medical management landscape for non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) has been changing with the rapidity of the seasons. Long gone is the day when all are treated equally.
As single-agent immunotherapies continue to show promising results, the challenge is now to determine which combination regimens with immunotherapies can improve outcomes.
As the number of patients receiving immune checkpoint blockade grows, the combination of radiation and immunotherapy has become increasingly relevant, particularly in the palliative care setting, where radiation is used to treat painful lesions, brain metastases, or isolated progression.
Immunotherapy has changed the landscape of oncology, particularly in advanced metastatic disease, where the chance of prolonged remission is now measured in years or even into the early decades in some cancers.
Accessing chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell clinical trials for relapsed and refractory B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is challenging for pediatric patients who have experienced a relapse of B-cell ALL or have been refractory to standard therapy.
As immune checkpoint inhibitors gain traction for the treatment of a variety of cancers, it is important to be aware of all the potential side effects that can occur.
In the longest follow-up on single-agent nivolumab to date, 5-year overall survival (OS) was 16% in patients with advanced non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) in updated results from a phase 1b dose-ranging study (CA209-003).
One of the many responsibilities of a navigator is to facilitate patient education—it is therefore imperative that we educate ourselves on new treatments, distill the information into lay terms, and use that information to effectively educate our patients.
A new study has shown that combination immunotherapy can yield significant clinical benefits—even in heavily pretreated populations.
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.
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