In a nutshell
This review focused on whether adoptive immunotherapy (AI) can positively influence the chance of survival for patients with non-small-cell lunger cancer (NSCLC) that have undergone surgery. The authors concluded that AI post surgery is safe and effective.
Some background
For patients with NSCLC, surgery is usually followed by another treatment such as chemotherapy. Recent methods however, have largely focused on tailoring the therapy specific to the patient. This includes basing the treatment on factors such as genetic mutations (changes) present in the cancer or activating the patients’ immune system to fight the cancer. One example of this is adoptive immunotherapy (AI). This involves taking the patient’s immune cells and growing them to high numbers outside the body. The cells are then returned to the body to fight the cancer. It remains unclear whether AI post-surgery is effective for treating NSCLC. Because many lung cancer tumors are not suitable for surgery, the sample size of patients in trials is usually very small.
Methods & findings
The authors reviewed trials that compared post-surgical AI to no therapy or to a different non-AI therapy. They included 4 trials that had a combined 472 patients. These patients were treated with surgery followed by AI, either with chemotherapy or alone, or were treated with surgery followed by chemotherapy alone.
AI was associated with a 39% decrease in the risk of death compared to those not treated with AI. This remained true for both patients who received more and patients who received less than 10 cycles.
AI combined with chemotherapy was more effective than chemotherapy alone. The combination was associated with a 43% reduction in the risk of death compared to chemotherapy alone. There was no significant difference between AI alone or AI combined with chemotherapy.
The side effect rates were poorly disclosed in some of the trials. The most common side effects were fever, chills and shivering.
The bottom line
The authors concluded that AI post-surgery was associated with improved overall survival for patients with NSCLC.
Published By :
PLOS ONE
Date :
Sep 12, 2016
