According to News Medical, a group of researchers at Johns Hopkins and the Bloomberg-Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy recently found encouraging results for a study involving immunotherapy to treat a lethal type of prostate cancer in its advanced stage.
What is prostate cancer?
Prostate cancer is a type of cancer that forms in the prostate gland of the male reproductive system. The prostate is the organ that is just below the bladder and in front of the rectum. It is typically found in older men and symptoms include pain or burning while urinating, pain in the back, frequent urination, and more. To read more about this type of cancer, click here.
The study done concerning a lethal type of prostate cancer showed that this specific type of prostate cancer may respond well to immunotherapy. Specifically, the research centered on targeting AR-V7+ prostate cancer with the immunotherapy combination of ipilimumab as well as nivolumab.
The research is the first of its kind in a few ways.
First, it’s the first study that has targeted this exact type of prostate cancer. Also, it is the first to utilize combination immunotherapy with nivolumab and ipilimumab. These aspects of the study mean it can only mean good things for the future of similar research.
“This is the first prostate cancer study to be supported by the Bloomberg-Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy since the institute was launched and provides the first evidence that immunotherapy can indeed benefit some patients with prostate cancer, a cancer type previously thought to be completely immunotherapy resistant,” said Dr. Pardoll, Director of Bloomberg-Kimmel Institute.
The study took place from December 2016 to October 2017, and it involved patients on IV infusions of nivolumab plus ipilimumab. This treatment was given once every three weeks and administered in four doses. Later, the patients were given a maintenance dose of just nivolumab biweekly.
Results from the study showed that 13 percent of the male patients saw a significant (at least 50 percent) decrease in their level of prostate-specific antigen. Moreover, 1/4 of the enrolled patients’ tumors shrank either completely or partially on the combination immunotherapy.
Even more interestingly, around 40% of patients in the study had a specific genetic type of prostate cancer that was related to mutations in the genes that are associated with the BRCA pathway. BRCA mutations, of course, are most popularly associated with breast and ovarian cancer in women.
“Remarkably, all of the benefit from ipilimumab plus nivolumab appeared to occur in patients who had one of these gene mutations, particularly in two men with BRCA2 mutations,” said senior author of the study, Emmanuel Antonarakis.
It turns out, this means that the encouraging findings for the immunotherapy on patients with prostate cancer may also have implications for those with ovarian and breast cancers.
“This finding is important, because BRCA2 is not a gene that was previously thought to sensitize patients to immune checkpoint inhibitors and, if true, will have profound implications for other diseases, such as breast and ovarian cancers where these genes are frequently mutated,” continued Antonarakis.
To conclude, the research done by scientists at Johns Hopkins as well as Bloomberg-Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy suggested that combination immunotherapy with nivolumab plus ipilimumab was safe and tolerable for patients with AR-V7+ advanced prostate cancer.
Not only was the treatment safe, it was also quite effective. Current results are encouraging and also provide some implications for research and treatment advancement in ovarian and breast cancers in females.
To read more about this research and its implications, click here.
