Dr. Moore on Challenges With Immunotherapy in Ovarian Cancer

Kathleen N. Moore, MD, assistant professor, Stephenson Cancer Center, The University of Oklahoma, discusses challenges with immunotherapy agents in the treatment of patients with ovarian cancer.

Overall, immunotherapy is well tolerated. However, there are significant toxicities that occur that providers need to be mindful of because they differ from other targeted agents, says Moore. There are ongoing studies with immune checkpoint inhibitors, which should inform physicians on how to meet the safety bar. It is important to manage the safety for patients, which is true across all solid tumors.

The biggest challenge is identifying whether this a class of drugs that belongs in the treatment paradigm. Physicians are using PD-1/PD-L1 and CTLA-4 inhibitors, but there is a pipeline of agents that are not checkpoint modulators. There are even different ways to target different parts of the immune system. According to Moore, checkpoint inhibitors may not be the way that physicians should be targeting ovarian cancer for immune response, but there could be other effective ways to do it.