Reducing frequency of immunotherapy dosing could save money and time, keep patients on therapy longer
Source: Fred Hutch Cancer Centre, December 2023
Reducing how often patients receive immune checkpoint inhibitors can dramatically reduce medical costs while allowing patients to remain on lifesaving drugs, according to a recent study from Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center.
“One of the questions in the field is, how long do we keep patients on immunotherapy if they’re doing well?” said Fred Hutch medical oncologist Lisa Tachiki, MD, who led the new analysis, recently published in the journal Cancer Immunology, Immunotherapy.
Even when cancer appears to be gone, it looms. Patients whose tumors have responded well to treatment worry that going off that treatment will give their cancer an opportunity to recur. For many treatments, patients and providers can turn to evidence-backed guidelines. But immune checkpoint inhibitors, or ICIs, are too new.