Immunotherapy in Recurrence

"For patients at the time of first diagnosis there is a place for immunotherapy. For patients who respond very well and during remission there is a place for immunotherapy to minimize the risk of relapse," says Kunle Odunsi, gynecologic oncologist at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center. "And after multiple rounds of chemotherapy after recurrence, there is also a place for immunotherapy to be included in treatment."

Some of the studies that are going on right now investigate what immunotherapy can do for patients dealing with recurrence, or these studies look at how immunotherapy can help minimize the risk of recurrence for patients with ovarian cancer.

Such studies are looking at how to minimize relapse for patients who have completed their frontline therapy. Odunsi says that at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center these options are being considered as a part of studies being conducted there.

"So, patients who complete their frontline therapy or therapy for recurrent disease are able to be vaccinated to generate new responses, almost like how you vaccinate against the flu virus," Odunsi explains. "So, generating new responses, training the immune system to say when this cancer begins to come back we better go on the attack and we need to fight it off."

For patients that are already dealing with relapse, there are other immunotherapy options for treating ovarian cancer. One of those options is checkpoint inhibitors and the other is the use of cell therapywith adapted T cells immunotherapy to deploy two specific t cells in large numbers to the tumor, according to Odunsi.

He has advice for patients dealing with ovarian cancer. He recommends asking doctors plenty of questions about immunotherapy and furthermore asking for second opinions on the immunotherapy recommendations that a patient receives or on the response they are given by their doctor. He also said that it is important to ask about clinical trials since they are not approved as tentative care for cancer.

He also advises for patients to go to comprehensive cancer care centers if they reside within a geographic distance. Odunsi encourages patients to ask for a second opinion from a comprehensive cancer center because the clinical trials offered at comprehensive cancer centers might be different than treatment offered at a general medical center. A comprehensive cancer center would offer different alternatives.

While many immunotherapy treatments are still in clinical trial phases of development and have not been approved for the use of patients on a larger scale, one immunotherapy treatment has been approved as an option for patients dealing with ovarian cancer. According to the Cancer Research Institute, only bevacizumab, also known as Avastin, has been approved so far.

Finding an immunotherapy clinical trial, like Odunsi encourages looking into, can be best done by speaking with doctors and medical professionals. However, the Cancer Research Institute does provide a tool for those patients looking to investigate immunotherapy clinical trials and to participate in one themselves.

On their website, they provide resources for patients and anyone looking into ovarian cancer clinical trials including information on the different types of clinical trials that are currently being carried out. They also provide a place to search for these trials online, a hotline to discuss the trials and an email address. Their resources can all be found here.

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