| | March 202219UTLOOKHealthcare Tech CXO INSIGHTSBy James Holland, PhD. Senior Medical Writer, and Kindiya Geghman, PhD, CMPP. Vice President Medical & Scientific Services, Ashfield Health.Immunotherapy is a field of medicine that uses treatments designed to modify the body's own immune system so it can better fight cancer, infections, or other diseases, and remove damaged cells or cells that are not behaving correctly.Immunotherapy has changed the therapeutic landscape and expected outcomes for patients with several cancer types, including lungImmune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) are a class of immunotherapy that target and block cell surface proteins that prevent the immune system from acting against cancer cells. Blocking these proteins allows a person's immune system to activate and fight cancer cells. In the field of cancer, several cellular pathways are currently targeted and inhibited by ICIs: most notably, the PD-1 pathway, through both the PD-1 receptor and PD-L1 receptor-binding protein, and the CTLA-4 pathway through the CTLA-4 receptor.The first ICI approved in lung cancer was an antibody inhibiting the PD-1 receptor. It was FDA-approved in 2015,initially as second-line therapy for late-stage non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Since then, five additional lung cancer ICIs have been approved.While the introduction of ICIs has revolutionized the treatment of lung cancer and increased patient survival times, ICIs do not work equally well in all patients, for reasons that are still being investigated. In addition, some patients have better outcomes with therapies targeted to specific cancer-related genetic mutations (e.g., EGFR, ALK). Today, ICIs have become the standard of care for patients with NSCLC who do not have specific gene mutations and are used as the first treatment option from early to late-stage disease.There is a promising pipeline of immunotherapy-based treatments Novel therapies as well as novel combinations of existing therapies represent two main areas of focus in the field of immunotherapy for lung cancer.New immunotherapies currently in development for lung cancer include ICIs targeting different immune checkpoint pathways, as well as different classes of immunotherapies. Examples include new antibody therapies, antibody-drug conjugates (which specifically target cancer cells), cancer vaccines, and adaptive cell therapies (e.g., CART-Immunotherapy in lung cancer: building towards a patient-tailored futureJames Holland
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