Advances in Immunotherapy

Thanks to the generosity of local philanthropists, physician-scientists at HonorHealth Research Institute are examining several different aspects of the body’s immune response to cancer and how they can be leveraged to improve the effectiveness of today’s standard chemotherapies. 

Breast cancer 

As examples, our researchers are:

• Looking for new targets on an individual breast cancer patient’s immune cells that could perhaps be activated or ramped up to provide long-lasting immune responses.
• Using immunotherapy medications to tackle hard-to-treat triple-negative breast cancer, which is typically treated with chemotherapy. However, chemotherapy is not always effective for this type of breast cancer, especially if it recurs after initial treatment.

HonorHealth Research Institute investigators have learned that a significant proportion of women with triple-negative breast cancer tend to respond well to immunotherapy drugs. Based on this, researchers are now combining chemotherapy and immunotherapy agents to hit triple-negative and other aggressive breast cancer with a one-two punch: using chemotherapy to kill cancer cells and immunotherapy to help the immune system recognize and destroy any cancer cells that may try to resurge. This could mean that patients with aggressive breast cancers may not have to stay on chemotherapy as long.

• Investigating new immunotherapy drugs, including immune system stimulants injected directly into a breast cancer tumor. This causes local inflammation, which triggers immune cells to travel to the inflamed area to get rid of the tumor.

“Immunotherapy refers to medicines that help the body’s immune system recognize where cancer cells are lurking within the body and re-educate the immune system to go and eliminate them. Many of these immunotherapy agents are more tolerable and less life-altering than chemotherapy.”
—Jasgit Sachdev, MD, Director, HonorHealth Research Institute Breast and Gynecological Early Phase Trials

“We’re very excited about this innovative approach. We hope that stimulating a local immune response in the injected tumor will in turn stimulate an overall immune attack on tumors throughout the body, even those that are far away from the injected tumor.”
—Jasgit Sachdev, MD, Director, HonorHealth Research Institute Breast and Gynecological Cancer Early Phase Clinical Trial Program

Cellular Therapy

Again on the forefront of cancer research, HonorHealth Research Institute is studying an innovative type of immunotherapy. The program focuses on Tumor Infiltrating Lymphocytes (TILs), a type of immune cell that have left the bloodstream and migrated to the patient’s tumor. Scientists believe the presence of TILs indicates that the patient’s immune system is trying to attack the cancer. TIL cellular therapy aims to help the immune system in its mission to fight cancer. To do this:

• TILs are taken from a patient’s tumor and tested to identify the cells with the greatest anti-tumor activity.
• Those cells are then treated in a laboratory, turning them into powerful, personalized immune cells that can kill the patient’s particular cancer cells.
• Large numbers of the new killer cells are then grown in the laboratory and reinfused into the patient to help their immune system fight cancer.

“Immunotherapy has transformed the way we treat cancer and has provided patients with the possibility of durable remissions where this did not exist previously.”
—Michael S. Gordon, MD, Medical Director, HonorHealth Research Institute Oncology Clinical Trials

TILs are being developed for a growing number of HonorHealth Research Institute patients This vital work is key to validating the TIL model as a potential therapeutic advance for application in hard-to-treat cancers, such as colon and pancreatic, as well as for other solid tumors, such as breast and melanoma.

Pancreatic Cancer

Investigators at HonorHealth Research Institute were instrumental in one of the first clinical trials showing how pancreatic cancer patients can benefit from immunotherapy. Results of the four-year study, conducted in collaboration with an international team of researchers, were published in May 2020 in Nature Medicine, a premier scientific journal.

Patients in the study, which was conducted at HonorHealth Research Institute and 30 other locations in the U.S. and across the globe, had metastatic pancreatic cancer, meaning their cancer had spread to other parts of the body. They were given pembrolizumab, an immune therapy drug, in combination with BL-8040, an agent that makes the tumor microenvironment more receptive to immunotherapy.

The study, which is currently in a follow-up phase and continues at HonorHealth Research Institute, has shown that:

• The combination of pembrolizumab and BL-8040 appears to make pancreatic cancer more “hot,” meaning it could work in tandem with the body’s own immune system. Previous studies have shown pancreatic tumors to be “cold,” meaning immune therapies such as pembrolizumab were not able to act against the cancer.
• Patients who had previously received one line of chemotherapy and were treated with pembrolizumab, BL-8040, as well as chemotherapy drugs 5-fluorouracil and nanolipsomal irinotecan, had a 32 percent response rate—meaning their tumors shrank substantially. This response rate is double what is seen with traditional chemotherapy.