Impressive Immunotherapy Cancer Drug Results, Researchers Ask, What's Next? Sloan Kettering Trial

- 'Eye-catching cancer drug trial results have researchers asking: What’s next?' - The Washington Post, June 10, '22. Ed.

After a small cancer drug study yielded the unprecedented result of 100% of participants entering remission, oncologists — and patients — wonder if the approach from the experimental drug trial can apply to other types of cancer. The study out of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in NY has oncologists excited over the prospect that immunotherapy, the treatment type used in the trial, has increasingly shown effectiveness — without surgery — against tumors with a specific abnormality.

All of the trial’s participants had tumors with the abnormality known as mismatch repair (MMR) deficiency, a mutation that occurs in between 5 and 10% of rectal cancer cases and is also present in endometrial, bladder, breast and prostate tumors. Though the trial was tested in patients whose tumor mutation is present in roughly 4% of all cancer cases, the results provide a template for how to tailor immunotherapy drugs to attack specific tumors that, due to their mutation, tend to be more resistant to traditional therapies, according to Julie Gralow, chief medical officer and executive vice president of American Society of Clinical Oncology.

“That’s the promise of this: It’s really the concept of being able to match a tumor, and the genomics of what’s driving it, with a therapy,” Gralow told The Wash. Post on Thursday. “Because we can move this beyond just this subset of rectal cancer.” The Sloan Kettering trial, which began in late 2019, took 18 early-stage rectal cancer patients with the same tumor mutation who had no prior treatment and gave them the drug dostarlimab every 3 weeks for 6 months.

Tumors completely disappeared in all 14 patients who had completed the treatment by the time the study published (4 more remain on track with similar results), and none have required follow-up treatment. The results mark the 1st time immunotherapy alone eliminated the need for chemotherapy, radiation or surgery, which can cure patients but leave them with life-altering effects like infertility, bowel and sexual dysfunction or permanent reliance on a colostomy bag. The study authors note the earliest patient to complete the trial is more than 2 years post-treatment, and all patients will be monitored for at least 5 years to ensure no tumor regrowth or reemergence...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/06/10/experimental-cancer-drug/