Overview of immune checkpoint inhibitors in gynecological cancer treatment

Pirš, Boštjan (author), Škof, Erik (author), Smrkolj, Vladimir (author), Smrkolj, Špela (author)

In the last ten years, clinical oncology has been revolutionized by the introduction of oncological immunotherapy, mainly in the form of immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) that transformed the standard of care of several advanced solid malignancies. Using ICIs for advanced gynecological cancers has yielded good results, especially for endometrial cancer. In ovarian or cervical cancer, combining ICIs with other established agents has shown some promise. Concurrently with the clinical development of ICIs, biomarkers that predict responses to such therapy have been discovered and used in clinical trials. The translation of these biomarkers to clinical practice was somewhat hampered by lacking assay standardization and non-comprehensive reporting of biomarker status in trials often performed on a small number of gynecological cancer patients. We can expect increased use of ICIs combined with other agents in gynecological cancer in the near future. This will create a need for reliable response prediction tools, which we believe will be based on biomarker, clinical, and tumor characteristics. In this article, we review the basic biology of ICIs and response prediction biomarkers, as well as the latest clinical trials that focus on subgroup effectiveness based on biomarker status in gynecological cancer patients.

• Language: English
• Keywords: immune check-point inhibitor, biomarker, endometrial cancer, ovarian cancer, uterine cervical cancer, vulvar cancer, treatment response prediction
• Work type: Article
• Typology: 1.02 - Review Article
• Organization: MF - Faculty of Medicine
• Publication status: Published
• Publication version: Version of Record
• Year: 2022
• Number of pages: 24 str.
• Numbering: Vol. 14, iss. 3, art. 631
• PID: 20.500.12556/RUL-137026
• UDC: 618.1
• ISSN on article: 2072-6694
• DOI: 10.3390/cancers14030631
• COBISS.SI-ID: 95979779
• Publication date in RUL: 30.05.2022

Record is a part of a journal

• Title: Cancers
• Shortened title: Cancers
• Publisher: MDPI
• ISSN: 2072-6694
• COBISS.SI-ID: 517914137

Licences

• License: CC BY 4.0, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
• Link: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Description: This is the standard Creative Commons license that gives others maximum freedom to do what they want with the work as long as they credit the author.
• Licensing start date: 01.02.2022

Secondary language

• Language: Slovenian
• Keywords: ginekologija, rak endometrija, biomarkerji, rak jajcevodov, rak materničnega vratu, zdravljenje

Projects

• Funder: Other - Other funder or multiple funders
• Funding programme: University Medical Centre Ljubljana
• Project number: TP20210160