Female Reproductive Cancer: Is Immunotherapy an Option?
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Ovarian Cancer
Ovarian cancer is diagnosed in more than three hundred thousand people worldwide each year, with 180,000 fatalities. Ovarian cancer is projected to be diagnosed in around 21,000 persons in the United States in 2021. It causes the death of most of that number, making it the top cause of death from gynecologic cancer.
While there have been substantial advancements in chemo-based medicine and surgical therapies for ovarian cancer, the survival rate has not increased a lot. Patients with ovarian cancer at a further stage have a dismal prognosis due to late detection and a lack of proper treatment for patients that recur. Chemotherapy helps many women with advanced ovarian cancer, although the effects are usually short-lived.
Treatment Options for Ovarian Cancer
There are several options for ovarian cancer treatment. They are :
Surgery is followed by routine chemotherapy. In more than 50% of the patients, this course of therapy results in complete response. On normal blood tests and imaging scans, a complete response indicates no apparent indication of illness. After completing upfront chemotherapy, some patients might qualify for maintenance therapy with drugs of a new class known as PARP inhibitors. PARP inhibitors have proved to have delayed and prevented relapse of the disease in some patients, particularly in tumors that carry mutations in the BRCA2 and BRCA1 genes.
Immunotherapy Treatment for Ovarian Cancer
Immunotherapy is a type of cancer treatment that uses the system of immunity in the patient’s body to help eliminate cancer cells. The FDA has authorized three immunotherapy treatments. They are as follows :
- Targeted Antibodies
Bevacizumab (Avastin®): an antibody of the monoclonal kind that suppresses tumour blood vessel development by targeting the VEGFR/VEGF pathway; authorized for patients diagnosed recently and recurrent cancer in the ovary.
- Immunomodulators
Dostarlimab (Jemperli) is an inhibitor of a checkpoint that targets the PD-L1/PD-1 pathway and has been authorised for people with ovarian cancer of the advanced kind who have mismatch repair failure in DNA.
Pembrolizumab is an inhibitor of a checkpoint that targets the PD-L1/PD-1 pathway and has been authorised for people with ovarian cancer of the advanced kind who have high microsatellite instability (MSI-H), mismatch repair failure in DNA, or a high tumour mutational load (TMB-H)
Clinical trials are often unnecessary for patients with first stage malignancies (survival rates of higher than 95% following complete surgery). Patients with platinum-resistant, recurrent ovarian cancer might consider participating in clinical trials for Immunotherapy.
All-in-all!
In conclusion, Immunotherapy has emerged as a viable treatment therapy for curing Ovarian Cancer, and it might become a much more popular method for treating Ovarian Cancer in the future.