Is it feasible to change the immunotherapy dose schedule for a patient in complete response?

Source: Healio, February 2020

Yes.

Immunotherapy represents a novel form of therapy in many ways, and it may not need to be given continuously. Currently approved checkpoint inhibitors activate the patient’s immune system, allowing it to target the cancer.

The question is, do you need to keep giving the drug to continue that activation? With ipilimumab (Yervoy, Bristol-Myers Squibb), the first checkpoint inhibitor approved for melanoma, patients get four doses and then no further therapy. We now have long-term survival data for patients treated with ipilimumab suggesting that patients who have responded and still have disease control at 3 years are very unlikely to experience recurrence. With high-dose interleukin-2, one of the first immunotherapies, patients received a defined course and then no further therapy. With decades of follow-up for these patients, about 5% to 10% have long-term remissions.