New Cancer Treatment Promises Hope for Therapy Resistant Patients

Doctors have discovered a new treatment for cancer that can halt its progression in patients who have become resistant to immunotherapy.

Immunotherapy is a type of cancer treatment that uses the immune system to target and kill cancer cells. It can save lives when all other therapeutic interventions, such as surgery, radiotherapy, or chemotherapy, have failed. However, it is not beneficial to all patients, and some tumors can evolve to resist it. 

Oncologists in the UK recently learned that combining immunotherapy with the new experimental drug guadecitabine can counteract immunotherapy resistance in cancer, the findings of which were published in the Journal of Cancer Immunotherapy.

The combined effect of the immunotherapy drug pembrolizumab and the next-generation DNA hypomethylating agent, guadecitabine, stopped cancer cells from spreading in more than a third of patients participating in the early phase 1 trial. The doctors also discovered that patients who were expected to die after trying all treatment options lived much longer with this treatment.

Patients with lung, breast, prostate, and bowel cancer from the Royal Marsden and University College London hospitals participated in the trial. The disease was stopped in 37 percent of the 30 patients whose cancer activity was studied, with no tumor progression for 24 weeks or more. Prior to the trial, three-fifths of the group (60 percent) were resistant to immunotherapy. Almost four in ten (39 percent) of them did not become sicker as a result of the drug combination.

Experts at the Institute of Cancer Research and the Royal Marsden NHS (National Health Service) Foundation Trust, explained that the dual combination has the potential to become an effective new weapon against many different types of cancer.

The study’s chief researcher, Professor Johann de Bono, who is also a professor of Experimental Cancer Medicine at the Institute of Cancer Research and a consultant medical oncologist at the Royal Marsden, stated,

I think one of the most important things about this trial is that we used multiple different methods to look for changes in the immune system, robustly showing that it was being influenced by the combination treatment. In the long term, we hope that if these effects are confirmed in other patient groups and future studies, guadecitabine and pembrolizumab could help to tackle some of the resistance to immunotherapy we see in too many types of cancer.