The congress of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) which opened on May 31 in Chicago brings together oncologists from all over the world who come to present their latest discoveries. Focus on a few of them.
Like every year, tens of thousands of doctors, researchers and scientists from all over the world are gathered in Chicago at the congress of theAmerican Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) to present their latest work in oncology. On the menu, immunotherapy, artificial intelligence or even nanoparticles. Focus on some innovations presented this weekend, which could well change the world of tomorrow.
Survival time after immunotherapy
Immunotherapy is gradually taking its place in the treatment of certain cancers such as melanoma, skin, kidney, lung, breast and ENT cancer. Unlike chemotherapy, which seeks to destroy the tumour, immunotherapy consists of administering substances that will stimulate, or even “mobilize”, the body’s immune defenses in order to make it more resistant to the disease. An innovative technique rewarded with the 2018 Nobel Prize in Medicine. 3000 trials are currently being conducted around the world with this treatment. But doctors have enough hindsight to draw up an initial assessment and one of this year’s themes is the survival time of patients treated with immunotherapy.
Yohann Loriot, oncologist at the Gustave Roussy Institute in Villejuif, cites the example of bladder cancer in France news. “Patients who have been treated for several years are still alive, something that we have not seen so far with chemotherapy in bladder cancer. Clearly, immunotherapy changes the prognosis of patients. Obviously this is not not very interesting if it lasts three or four months, it’s much more interesting if it lasts a year, two years, even several years”.
Aurélien Marabelle, oncologist at Gustave Roussy and president of the brand new French immunotherapy society, confirms to France Inter that “patients who had immunotherapy for a year, or two years, and who then stopped because of a protocol point of view it was planned like that, have not relapsed from their cancer. We are at one year, two years, up to three years of follow-up and the cancer does not come back.
Another advantage for patients: unlike chemotherapy, there are no side effects during treatment with immunotherapy. No nausea, no hair loss. The disadvantages however, are its ineffectiveness in the treatment of certain types of cancer such as those of the prostate or the pancreas and that immunotherapy only works in 20% of people.
Artificial intelligence for the over 70s
It is sometimes difficult for doctors to know how to treat people aged 70 and over with cancer. A tool created by a French team from the Henri Mondor hospital in Créteil based on the experience of 2,000 patients over 70, who have already been treated for all types of cancer, could help them do this. “We’re going to look at a whole bunch of factors that define the clinical state of the patient: does the patient have nutritional deficits, cognitive deficits, we’re going to put all that in the balance so that our ‘machine learning algorithm ‘ predicts the probability of survival”, explains the epidemiologist behind this artificial intelligence, Etienne Audureau.
And add next to France Inter : “It really makes it possible to quantify things and to say, for a given patient, that a chemotherapy treatment can be tolerated and bring a real survival benefit and for another patient, on the contrary, that taking into account his ground the treatment will rather degrade his quality of life without having a real survival benefit behind.”
More precisely, it is not this tool that would decide the nature of the treatments to be administered to each patient, but it would greatly contribute to making this decision. In particular taking into account how 2000 other patients of the same age were treated and the effectiveness of the chosen technique. If this tool is valuable, it is because cancers in people aged 65 and over represent 62.4% of estimated cancers in 2017. According to the Inca, for people aged 85 and over, 45,993 new cases of cancer are estimated, ie 11.5% of all diagnosed cancer cases (9.3% among men and 14% among women).
Nanoparticles to optimize the effectiveness of radiotherapy
Nanoparticles are molecules whose size varies between 1 and 100 nanometers, which are injected into the tumor to increase the effectiveness of radiotherapy. This technique has been tested at the Institut Curie on around ten patients suffering from cancer of the throat, oral cavity or tonsils. “The principle is to inject the nanoparticles into the tumor, this is done under general anesthesia by a surgeon, the day before the start of radiotherapy, details to France Inter Christophe Le Tourneau, oncologist at the institute. Then the radiotherapy starts and the nanoparticles, by their presence, multiply the effect of the radiotherapy by, roughly, 1.5.”
According to the results presented at the ASCO, the nanoparticles were effective in the treatment of three quarters of the patients (rather old and fragile). “Radiotherapy remains a standard treatment, if we can increase the cure rate thanks to nanoparticles, it’s extraordinary!”
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