Early use of immunotherapy and chemotherapy combination therapy may be effective in treating patients with stomach cancer

In a study published in the international journal Gastroenterology, scientists from Columbia University's Irving Medical Center and others showed that combining immunotherapy with standard chemotherapy could be more effective in treating stomach cancer in the early stages of the disease.
researcher Wooosook Kim said treatment options for patients with advanced stomach cancer are often very limited, with many gastric cancer patients not suitable for surgical removal and patients responding less to radiotherapy or chemotherapy.
many types of cancers express specific proteins to inhibit the attack of host immune cells on tumors, and immunotherapy blocks the function of these special proteins, thereby releasing the function of immune cells.
immunotherapy, which blocks PD1 and PDL1 proteins, has been approved to treat patients with advanced stomach cancer, and this immunotherapy can also be used as a second- or third-line treatment after chemotherapy, but the response rate is often low.
to better understand why immunotherapy is not effective in treating malignant stomach cancer, the researchers closely observed the micro-environmental characteristics around tumors in mice by studying mouse models of stomach cancer.
Photo Source: Wang lab, Columbia University Irving Medical Center They found that mice with advanced stomach cancer had a large number of myelin-derived suppressor cells (MDSCs, myeloid-derived suppressor cells) that express the PDL1 protein, which appears to help cancer cells effectively beat immunotherapy attacks.
The cancer may not be affected when immunotherapy is given to mice with malignant tumors, and the use of immunotherapy in the early stages of the disease in mice may be effective in slowing the progression of the cancer before the tumor is formed and MDSCs accumulate, while combining immunotherapy with standard chemotherapy or promoting tumor atrophy, which kills many MDSCs.
Final researcher Timothy Wang said the results of this study suggest that combining chemotherapy with immunotherapy or by partially targeting MDSCs improves response rates in patients with stomach cancer, and we don't have enough information to determine whether MDSCs levels can be used to predict how patients will respond to this combination therapy.
results of this paper show that when the body MDSCs level is low, the combination of chemotherapy and immunotherapy in the early stages of the disease may enhance the response rate of patients with stomach cancer to therapy.
original source: Woosook Kim, Timothy H. Chu, Henrik Nienhüser, et al. PD-1 Signaling Promotes Tumor-Infiltrating Myeloid-Derived Suppressor Cells and Gastric Tumorigenesis in Mice, Gastroenterology (2020). DOI:10.1053/j.gastro.2020.10.036 This article is from Bio Valley, for more information, please download Bio Valley APP (