The Effectiveness of Cancer Immune Checkpoint Inhibitor Retreatment and Rechallenge-A Systematic Review

Adrian Perdyan; Bartosz Kamil Sobocki; Amar Balihodzic; Anna Dąbrowska; Justyna Kacperczyk; Jacek Rutkowski

doi:10.3390/cancers15133490

The Effectiveness of Cancer Immune Checkpoint Inhibitor Retreatment and Rechallenge-A Systematic Review

Cancers (Basel). 2023 Jul 4;15(13):3490. doi: 10.3390/cancers15133490.

Authors

Adrian Perdyan^{1

2}, Bartosz Kamil Sobocki³, Amar Balihodzic^{4

5}, Anna Dąbrowska³, Justyna Kacperczyk⁶, Jacek Rutkowski⁷

Affiliations

¹ 3P-Medicine Laboratory, Medical University of Gdansk, 80-210 Gdansk, Poland.
² Department of Biology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
³ Student Scientific Circle of Oncology and Radiotherapy, Medical University of Gdansk, 80-210 Gdansk, Poland.
⁴ Division of Oncology, Department of Internal Medicine, Comprehensive Cancer Center Graz, Medical University of Graz, 8036 Graz, Austria.
⁵ BioTechMed-Graz, 8010 Graz, Austria.
⁶ The University Clinical Centre in Gdansk, Medical University of Gdansk, 80-210 Gdansk, Poland.
⁷ Department of Oncology and Radiotherapy, Medical University of Gdansk, 80-210 Gdansk, Poland.

Abstract

Despite a great success of immunotherapy in cancer treatment, a great number of patients will become resistant. This review summarizes recent reports on immune checkpoint inhibitor retreatment or rechallenge in order to overcome primary resistance. The systematic review was performed according to PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) guidelines. The search was performed using PubMed, Web of Science and Scopus. In total, 31 articles were included with a total of 812 patients. There were 16 retreatment studies and 13 rechallenge studies. We identified 15 studies in which at least one parameter (overall response rate or disease control rate) improved or was stable at secondary treatment. Interval treatment, primary response to and the cause of cessation for the first immune checkpoint inhibitors seem to be promising predictors of secondary response. However, high heterogeneity of investigated cohorts and lack of reporting guidelines are limiting factors for current in-depth analysis.

Keywords: immune checkpoint inhibitors; melanoma; oncology; rechallenge; retreatment.

Publication types

Review

Grants and funding

This research was supported by the Foundation for Polish Science under the International Research Agendas Program financed from the Smart Growth Operational Program 2014–2020 (Grant Agreement No. MAB/2018/6). A.P. is currently supported with Walczak’s Scholarship funded by NAWA-Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange (Scholarship Agreement No. BPN/WAL/2022/1/00024/U/00001).