TITLE:
Current Algorithm for Treatment of Advanced NSCLC Patients: How to Include Active Immunotherapy?
AUTHORS:
Gisela Gonzalez, Arlhee Diaz-Miqueli, Tania Crombet, Luis E. Raez, Agustin Lage
KEYWORDS:
Lung Cancer Therapy; Active Immunotherapy; Cancer Vaccines
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Cancer Therapy,
Vol.4 No.8A,
September
27,
2013
ABSTRACT:
Despite the availability of different treatments
for advanced NSCLC, all of them have a palliative intention and a cure for the disease is unlikely. Thus, advanced lung
cancer remains as an unmet medical need.
Chemotherapy has been used as the therapy of choice for advanced NSCLC patients,
but it is mainly limited by the patient’s performance status.
More recently, targeted therapies have introduced more specific treatment options
that show efficacy in specific niche of patients, but precisely due to their target
specificity, they usually provoke early resistance. In addition to these limitations, most of the best drugs currently used for
treatment of advanced NSCLC show small increases in patient survival with severe
associated toxicity. Novel drugs with low toxicity that could be given chronically
to control the advanced disease can make a difference. They could allow the management
of advanced cancer as a chronic disease that, even when not cured, it can be controlled for long periods of time offering patients a good quality of life. Active-specific immunotherapy is an area of oncology
that is rapidly expanding with encouraging results. Cancer vaccines against many
potential targets have shown to increase patient survival in clinical trials at
all stages NSCLC, when included as first-line, maintenance, or second-line therapy.
Safety of cancer vaccines supposes a new hope for cancer therapy, and this unique characteristic makes it possible to be used in sub-sets of patients that cannot receive
other approved treatments because of their high toxicity. In this paper, authors propose how active immunotherapy
could be included in the current algorithm for treatment of advanced NSCLC patients.