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How Immunotherapy may sometimes make Cancer worse?

Reporter: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN

A potential explanation is

Advances in Brief Cancer Cell Motility-inhibitory Protein in the Dunning Adenocarcinoma Model1 (2013)

1 comment

1. 
   Elaine Broskie•2017-04-08 08:22 PM

   Some cancer cells may just be more differentiated and therefore easier to kill with immunotherapy. Simultaneously since they are more differentiated they may be the sort of cells that hold more rogue cancer cells in check. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.326.7968

How Immunotherapy may sometimes make Cancer worse?

Warning signs

Kurzrock began asking around, collecting anecdotes about people — and even about laboratory mice — whose tumours had advanced rapidly after treatment with an immunotherapy. Even after collecting examples from several sources, she felt nervous about releasing her results. “We thought, ‘Who’s going to publish this? They’re not going to believe us,’” she says.

Meanwhile, researchers at the Gustave Roussy Institute in Villejuif, France, had stumbled on the same problem. Charles Ferté, an oncologist at the institute, recalls attending a meeting in which several physicians reported bizarre responses to PD-1 treatment. “Some friends and colleagues were saying, ‘I treated lung patients with that drug and the tumour completely exploded in two weeks’,” says Ferté.

Ferté and his colleagues decided to launch a systematic study of tumour growth in their patients. Last November, they published their results: of 131 people who received anti-PD-1 therapies, 9% developed what the investigators called “hyperprogressive” disease, with accelerated tumour growth¹. The phenomenon appeared to be more common in people over the age of 65.

On 28 March, Kurzrock and her colleagues published their data from 155 people treated with PD-1 inhibitors and other immunotherapies². Six of the people had extra copies of MDM2 or MDM4 and 10 had mutations in a gene called EGFR, which is associated with cancer. The team did not see any correlation between age and rapidly worsening disease, but they did notice that tumours grew faster in four of those with the extra MDM2 or MDM4 genes, and in two of the people with EGFR mutations.

SOURCE

6 APRIL 2017 | VOL 544 | NATURE

http://www.nature.com/news/promising-cancer-drugs-may-speed-tumours-in-some-patients-1.21755