Novel patterns of progression upon immunotherapy in other thoracic malignancies and uncommon populations

Abstract

In the immunotherapy era, considering the prolonged survival benefit and responses observed with immunecheckpoint inhibitors (ICI) in many cancer types, the identification of patients with rapid progression (PD) and deaths upon ICI has found some skepticism and resistance among the scientific community. Nevertheless, an acceleration of tumour during ICI, defined as hyperprogressive disease (HPD), has been recognized across different cancer types and evidence regarding rapid PDs and deaths are emerging in patients with malignant pleural mesothelioma (MPM), small cell lung cancer (SCLC) and thymic malignancies and in uncommon non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) populations. Of note, PD and early deaths (ED) rates upon single agent ICI were up to 60% and 30% in MPM and 70% and 38% in SCLC patients, respectively. Similarly, rapid PDs and deaths were observed in clinical trials and retrospective studies including patients with poor performance status (PS), HIV infection and rare NSCLC histologies. Atypical patterns of response, such as pseudoprogression (PsPD) may also occur in other thoracic malignancies (MPM) and in some uncommon populations (i.e., HIV patients), however probably at lower rate compared to HPD. The characterizations of HPD and PsPD mechanisms and the identification of common definition criteria are the next future challenges in this area of cancer research.