Search Results for "Immunotherapy"

Clinical trial results show that PD-1 inhibitors offer improved survival and a better safety profile compared to standard, single-agent chemotherapy for recurrent or metastatic squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck. However, because of their mechanism of action as immunotherapy, patients receiving the agents may experience immune-related adverse events (irAEs).

Care coordination, appropriate adverse event assessment and treatment, and rapid, continuous learning are essential priorities for oncology nurses to care for patients receiving immunotherapy, according to the experts who participated in ONS’s immunotherapy summit in March 2018. 

ONS member Virginia Bayer, BSN, RN, CCRP, research nurse supervisor at MD Anderson Cancer Center, joins ONS’s Barbara Lubejko, MS, RN, to discuss checkpoint inhibitors, their impact on patient care, what oncology nurses need to know about immunotherapies, and much more.

Altering a patient's gut microbiome through fecal transplant improved response to immune checkpoint inhibitor therapy in 40% of patients with advanced melanoma who initially did not respond to the immunotherapy in a small, single-arm clinical trial. Researchers reported the findings in Science.

“It’s really an exciting time to be in the field of oncology because we can have these specific drugs that target these specific variants rather than, back in the day, when we had to use kind of generic cancer therapies that weren’t specific for an individual’s cancer,” ONS member Suzanne Walker, PhD, CRNP, AOCN^®, senior advanced practice provider and coordinator for thoracic malignancies at the Abramson Cancer Center at Penn Presbyterian Medical Center in Philadelphia, PA, told Jaime Weimer, MSN, RN, AGCNS-BS, AOCNS^®, manager of oncology nursing practice at ONS, during a discussion about the latest updates in chemotherapy and immunotherapy treatments. Walker is one of the editors of ONS’s second edition of the Chemotherapy and Immunotherapy Guidelines and Recommendations for Practice book.

Lab-developed antibodies using a single-chain diabody format can target TP53 or RAS variants in solid tumors and T-cell receptor (TCR) variants in blood cancers, researchers reported in study findings published in Science, Science Immunology, and Science Translational Medicine, respectively.