SU2C researchers find treatment strategy for stage I-III NSCLC

An immunotherapy administered prior to surgery is yielding outcomes in 45% of patients treated in this small study from researchers on the Stand Up to Cancer-Cancer Research Institute Cancer Immunology Dream Team, who is a scientific partner of Stand Up to Cancer, according to results presented at the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting. It was published online in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Scientists at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg-Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center found that administering two doses of the Bristol-Myers Squibb anti-PD1 immunotherapy Opdivo (nivolumab) for several weeks prior to surgery was not only safe but 45 percent of the patients in the trial responded so well that there was little evidence of the cancer remaining upon follow-up. In addition, the patients’ immune systems also likely destroyed straggler tumor cells still circulating in the blood system, which can later take hold and lead to recurrence and metastasis.

This Dream Team’s approach, designed to arrest disease progression within the microenvironment, expands the scope of SU2C’s Cancer Interception research portfolio. SU2C is currently funding four Cancer Interception teams focusing on lung and pancreatic cancer.

In addition to the named Interception Teams, three additional SU2C-funded teams are engaged in interception-like approaches to treat multiple myeloma, colon cancer and ovarian cancer.

Historically, chemotherapy or chemoradiotherapy, is given to lung cancer patients to shrink a large, non-metastasized tumor, and in the past, immunotherapeutic agents have been administered after surgery with limited results.

SU2C-CRI Dream Team researchers hypothesized that leaving the tumor in place during initial treatment with immunotherapy would turn it into an “auto-vaccine” resulting in the activation of tumor-specific T cells that would then circulate through the body and find distant sites of micrometastases, thereby preventing relapse post-surgery which can happen to at least one-half of lung cancer patients who undergo surgery.

After a median follow-up of 12 months, three-quarters of the patients who underwent surgical resection were alive and recurrence-free. Recurrence-free survival at 18 months was 73 percent, and the median recurrence-free survival had not been reached at the time of data analysis. To date, only one patient has died of cancer recurrence after surgery. SU2C is cautious not to compare these outcomes with historical outcomes given that it was a small study.