Patient selection and monitoring for immunotherapies: Challenges for immune checkpoint antibody and cell therapies

Abstract

In the past 10 years, immunotherapies with immune checkpoint antibodies alone or in combinationwith other treatmentmodalities have become established as promising anticancer agents across a wide range of malignancies and have even demonstrated clinical effect in solid malignancies that were previously not thought to be susceptible to immune-based strategies. However, because of the high cost of applying these therapies, frequent observation of immune-related adverse events, and deviation from conventional tumor-response criteria, immunotherapies present novel challenges in appropriate patient selection and monitoring for the disease and immunological responses. In the age of personalized or precision medicine, clinicians, pharmaceutical companies, and translational researchers have united in the objective to develop criteria that would target a patient population most likely to benefit from these therapies in the face of potential toxicities. In this chapter, I focus on approaches for patient selection and monitoring in immune checkpoint antibody therapy, namely anticytotoxic T-lymphocyte-associated antigen (CTLA- 4) antibodies and anti-programmed death-1 (PD-1) or programmed death ligand-1 (PD-L1) antibodies. Briefly, I also discuss these principles in adoptive T cell therapies.