Dr. Moore on Challenges With Immunotherapy in Ovarian Cancer

In general, immunotherapy is well tolerated. However, there are significant toxicities that occur that providers need to be mindful of because the responses to them are different than other agents. There are ongoing studies with immune checkpoint inhibitors, so the education is out there and we are meeting that safety bar now. That is the same with any new agent. It is important to manage the safety for our patients, which is true across all solid tumors. The biggest challenge is identifying whether this a class of drugs that belongs in our treatment paradigm. I hope the answer is “yes,” since there are many options for targeting the immune system. We are using PD-1/PD-L1 and CTLA-4 inhibitors, but there is a pipeline of agents that are different checkpoint modulators. Even different ways to target different parts of the immune system are important. It may be that checkpoint inhibitors aren't the way that we should be targeting ovarian cancer for immune response, but there could be other effective ways to do it.