‘Chemoimmunotherapy’ for cervical cancer

The HPV vaccine, designed to prevent cervical cancer, is showing some promise to treat the disease when combined with standard chemotherapy, a new study says. Vaccine therapy on its own usually fails because patients’ immune systems are too weak to embrace it. But a small, early-phase "chemoimmunotherapy" trial found better outcomes for patients with advanced cervical cancer: 43% of the patients’ tumors regressed and another 43% saw their disease get no worse. The idea is to rev up anticancer immunity by increasing tumor-specific T cells — the job of the vaccine. Chemotherapy damps down myeloid cells, which can suppress the expansion of T cells. Patients in the trial with higher vaccine-induced immune responses lived longer. Two caveats: The study had no chemo-only arm for comparison and it did not collect pre- and post-vaccination tumor material to look at the tumor microenvironment.