In a recent study published in Cell Reports Medicine in January, the researchers at Tisch Cancer Institute revealed that a certain form of chemotherapy boosts the immune system’s ability to fight bladder cancer, especially in the case of pairing it with immunotherapy.
The study further reveals the reason why the approach, cisplatin chemotherapy, may be available to lead to a cure in small subsets of patients with metastatic, or advanced, bladder cancer. Researchers also believe that the findings can explain the failure of combining clinical trials with another type of chemotherapy, carboplatin-based chemo, with immunotherapy but the ones which are successful are the ones which use cisplatin with immunotherapy.
“We have known for decades that cisplatin works better than carboplatin in bladder cancer, however, the mechanisms underlying those clinical observations have remained elusive until now,” said the study’s lead author Matthew Galsky, M.D., Co-Director of the Center of Excellence for Bladder Cancer at The Tisch Cancer Institute at Mount Sinai.
“This study provides clues as to why cisplatin-based chemotherapy may achieve durable disease control in a subset of patients with metastatic bladder cancer, provides clues as to which patients may derive such benefit, and provides a foundation for building even better treatment regimens that exploit the immunomodulatory effects of cisplatin-based chemotherapy.”
At least 83,000 people in the United States suffer from bladder cancer annually. It is hard to treat metastatic bladder cancer with current treatments, so these findings hold a great value to effectively use the drugs available and determine effective combination therapies.
The research also revealed that cisplatin chemotherapy may work better when the body has generated a pre-existing, but restrained, immune response against the tumor. It further found that cisplatin damages DNA in cancer cells, which may be the cause of changes in expression of genes that might be able to improve the ability of body’s immune system to detect cancer cells.