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Immunotherapy in neuroendocrine tumors 2 - role of immunotherapy

Part 2 of 2
Published on January 30, 2017   40 min

A selection of talks on Immunology & Inflammation

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0:00
Hi, my name is Nitya Raj. And I'm going to be moving on to the second portion of the talk in which we're going to be focusing in on how to study for a Role of Immunotherapy in Neuroendocrine Tumors. We spent the previous portion of this talk discussing our currently available therapy options as of 2016.
0:24
So where does immunotherapy fall into all of this? And so as I spent the first portion of my talk, I've clearly explained that we have many treatment options, yet there has been a lot of interest in evaluating for a role of immunotherapy in the management of neuroendocrine tumors. An immunotherapy is a rapidly evolving field in many types of cancer with proven benefits in kidney cancer, lung cancer as well as melanoma. And for this reason, there has been increasing interest in studying immunotherapy in neuroendocrine tumors begging the question, "Where should we put immunotherapy in our treatment algorithm?"
1:01
So I'd first like to discuss why immunotherapy works in cancer. In tumorigenesis, cancer cells exploit immune checkpoint pathways to avoid detection by the immune system and evade immune destruction. These pathways include the PD-1 or PD-L1 pathway, which stands for the programmed cell death protein 1 pathways, PD-L2, the programmed cell death protein 2 pathway, as well as CTLA-4 cytotoxic T-lymphocyte-associated antigen 4. For these pathways, blocking of them causes the activation of T cells and accumulation of T cells at the tumor site, which is believed to cause tumor death. So clinically, monoclonal antibodies have actually been developed to inhibit these immunological checkpoints, and these monoclonal antibodies have demonstrated activity in some solid tumors. However, to date, few patients with NETs have been treated with checkpoint inhibitors.
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Immunotherapy in neuroendocrine tumors 2 - role of immunotherapy

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