According to a story from The Globe and Mail, doctors were baffled after four young women who had a deadly and rare type of ovarian cancer were saved with an immunotherapy treatment that, according to medical experts, should not have succeeded.
The four women were strangers that lived in different parts of the world, but all of them had received that same news from doctors: their ovarian cancer was fatal, and they did not have long to live. In an act of desperation, the women asked their doctors to try new immunotherapy treatments that had been successful in treating other types of cancer. Doctors were initially hesitant because they were convinced that the treatment would have no effect on the type of ovarian cancer that the women had, but at the same time, their patients had nothing to lose. To learn more about ovarian cancer, click here.
Remarkably, the ovarian cancer in all four of the women responded to treatment successfully. Their cancer went into remission and, as of now, their lives have returned to normal. Doctors and cancer experts were surprised but also encouraged by the story; if they could figure out how immunotherapy was able to defeat the ovarian cancer, than it may also be possible that immunotherapy could have uses for other cancers that doctors previously believed would not respond to the treatment method. Dr. Jedd Wolchok of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York is convinced that the story has revealed that the mechanism for how the immune system is able to recognize cancer tumors is still not fully understood.
Although a group of just four women is far from a legitimate clinical trial, researchers are interested in studying patients whose bodies appear to react differently to treatment when compared to most others. The women were afflicted by a very rare form of ovarian cancer called hypercalcemic small cell. It is almost always found in younger women and teenagers, and is caused by a genetic mutation. Since it is only linked to a single mutation, cancer researchers did not expect immunotherapy to work, because the immune system is much less likely to recognize the tumor as a threat.
The treatment that saved the four women is called nivolumab. The reason it worked is still unclear, but Dr. Douglas Levine, an expert in hypercalcemic small cell ovarian cancer, theorizes that a mutation characteristic of some forms of kidney cancer could be part of the cause. This mutation serves as a regulator for the expression of other genes; these genes behave normally and would not trigger an immune response.