The National Cancer Institute today announced a $2.5 million grant for an intended study on the efficacy of immunotherapy, as treatment in mesothelioma cases.
As reported in a release from Baylor on Feb. 16, Dr. Bryan Burt, head of the Division of General Thoracic Surgery at the Baylor College of Medicine, was awarded a five-year research grant for that amount to investigate immune checkpoint inhibitors in mesothelioma patients.
“Emerging clinical data has shown that treatment with … immune checkpoint inhibitors results in meaningful extension of life in half of patients.”
– Dr. Bryan Burt
The immune checkpoint inhibitors are a particular set of immunotherapy drugs that are designed to inhibit these molecules (immune checkpoints) in the body and essentially turn off a suppression which is typical of most immune checkpoints and allows for an innate immune response to take place. This is also sometimes needed because some types of cancer cells look like normal cells and your immune system might not recognize anything is wrong.
Risk-Reward
According to Dr. Burt, “The good news on the clinical front is that this approach has shown promise in early trials bringing meaningful extension of life for approximately half of patients receiving this type of treatment; however, they are also susceptible to developing immune-related side effects.”
The study by Dr. Burt will aim to create a clinical test capable of predicting the response of individual patients to immune checkpoint inhibitors and thereby avoid treating with these agents a majority of patients who would experience the immune-related side effects. Side effects can be from kidney infection to lung inflammation.
“Preliminary data collected retrospectively [from prior mesothelioma cases] showed that the tumors of patients who respond to [immune checkpoint inhibitors ] tend to have a certain immune cell composition, which is quite complex,” Burt said. “We developed a technique to analyze the presence of about 30 different cell types in a very small bit of a tumor sample.”
Multiple Goals
Dr. Burt noted that the end goal is to predict patient outcomes, “whether the tumor will completely or partially shrink or just remain stable for long periods of time.” However, a secondary goal is to better understand neoantigens, which are mutant proteins that form on some cancer cells.
“It will then be time for a clinical trial to conduct a rigorous prospective evaluation in which treatment depends on the results of the test,” Dr. Burt stated in the release.
The National Cancer Institute’s R37 MERIT five-year award to Dr. Burt allows for an extension of up to two years, which could prove important since the study — which is slated to begin this year — isn’t expected to conclude until 2028.
