What Late Stage Lung Cancer Patients Should Know About Immunotherapy During Coronavirus
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/ Updated January 6th, 2023

What Late Stage Lung Cancer Patients Should Know About Immunotherapy During Coronavirus

Medical Source: Dr. Brendon Stiles
Montefiore and Albert Einstein College of Medicine
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Immunotherapy Treatment Impacted By Covid-19

  • The data to develop guidance around treatment for cancer during Covid-19 is extremely early and uncertain
  • Physicians are not entirely sure how immunotherapy drugs will interact with Covid-19
  • You should consult your physician on whether to go ahead with treatment, and possibly get multiple opinions
If you’re a lung cancer patient on immunotherapy treatments, you are very likely wondering how your care will be effected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Of course, the possibility of getting coronavirus is a scary scenario for any cancer patient, but what’s more challenging is that there’s very little data to guide specific decisions for specific coronavirus treatment protocols.

“We really don’t know what the interaction of (immunotherapy) is going to be with the virus,” Dr. Brendon Stiles, a thoracic surgeon at Weill Cornell Medicine, tells SurvivorNet. “You could probably argue both ways that it may completely throw your immune system out of whack and predispose you to infection [or] maybe because you’re getting an immune stimulus, you might be able to fight off viruses better. We’re going to need a lot more data to understand that better.”

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One of the main concerns facing physicians is potential side effects of any cancer treatment. “Where we could potentially run into trouble is that some of these (immunotherapy) drugs can cause pneumonitis, inflammation in the lungs. Chemotherapy can cause immunosuppression so that the combination of those may be tough for some patients to take,” says Dr. Stiles.

 

“It’s going to depend on situation,” Dr. Stiles says. “If a patient is at the start of their stage four course and treatment needs to get started, I personally would offer our standard treatment. If they’ve already had twelve months of immunotherapy and they’re doing well, and things are going okay, maybe it makes sense to skip the dose to keep them away from a medical establishment right now and keep them safe.”

Immunotherapy In Lung Cancer Treatment

Immunotherapy treatment marks a revolution in lung cancer care. The new class of immunotherapy drugs, also known as checkpoint inhibitors, have had encouraging survival rates when used by lung cancer patients.

In a separate interview with SurvivorNet, Dr. Stiles says that some late stage cancer patients have benefited from immunotherapy treatment without chemotherapy being involved.

"If you have high expression of a protein that we know is targeted by immunotherapy, you may just get immunotherapy alone,” Dr. Stiles tells SurvivorNet.

Immunotherapy uses the power of your own immune system to recognize cancer cells and kill them. It has been especially successful in late stage lung cancer, but Dr. Stiles says that clinical trials are developing so it can treat early-stage lung cancer as well.

Learn more about SurvivorNet's rigorous medical review process.

Dr. Brendon Stiles is a thoracic surgeon at Montefiore Health System. Read More

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