In a previous post I wrote about cancer immunotherapy and, in particular, about the relevance of immune checkpoints such as CTLA-4. For the scientific work leading to this therapy Jim Allison and Tasuku Honjo were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2018. I am reading a book on this subject, ‘The Breakthrough. Immunotherapy and the Race to Cure Cancer’ by Charles Graeber. I did not feel in harmony with this book due to some notable features which made it far from me. One was the use of words and concepts which are typically American and whose meanings I as a European do not know. Of course I could go out and google them but I do not always feel like it. A similar problem arises from the fact that I belong to a different generation than the author. It is perhaps important to realise that the author is a journalist and not someone with a strong background in biology or medicine. One possible symptom of this is the occurrence of spelling mistakes or unconventional names (e.g. ‘raff’ instead of ‘raf’, ‘Mederex’ instead of ‘Medarex’ for the company which played an essential role in the development of antibodies for cancer immunotherapy, ‘dendrites’ instead of ‘dendritic cells’). As a consequence I think that if a biological statement made in the book looks particularly interesting it is worth trying to verify it independently. For example, the claim in one of the notes to Chapter 5 that penicillin is fatal to mice is false. This is not only of interest as a matter of scientific fact since it has also been used as an (unjustified) argument by protesters against medical experiments in animals. More details can be found here.
Despite this I find the book a very rewarding read due to the stories it tells. It was exciting to read the first chapter which describes the experiences of one of the first patients to experience what seemed like a miracle cure due to treatment with an antibody to PD-L1. I find it fascinating to get an impression of what a person in this type of situation actually lives through. On a personal note, I was happy to see that when the patient met the team of researchers who had developed the treatment one of the people present was Ira Mellman. As I mentioned in a previous post I have been present at a lecture of Mellman. The second chapter describes known cases where an infectious disease can lead to the elimination of a tumour. It describes how, more than a hundred years ago, William Coley tried to turn this observation into a therapy. His success in doing so was very limited and this was unavoidable. The ideas needed to understand what might be going on in such a situation simply did not exist at that time. Without understanding it was impossible to pursue a therapy in a controlled way. I knew something about this story before reading the book but it filled in a lot more background for me. The key figure in the third chapter is Steven Rosenberg. I had not heard his name before. He had an important position at the NIH and pursued research into cancer immunotherapy during a period where there were few returns. One substance which he tried to use therapeutically was IL-2. Here again I was pleased to come across the name of a person who I have heard give a talk, as mentioned in a previous post. This is Kendall Smith, the discoverer of IL-2.
Chapter four is concerned with Jim Allison, the discoverer of the first type of cancer immunotherapy using CTLA-4. I find it interesting that in his research Allison was not deriven by the wish to find a cancer therapy. He wanted to understand T cells and their activation. While doing so he discovered CTLA-4, as an important ‘off switch’ for T cells. It seems that from the beginning Allison liked to try certain experiments just to see what would happen. If what he found was more complicated than he expected he found that good. In any case, Allison did an experiment where mice with tumours were given antibodies to CTLA-4. This disables the off switch. The result was that while the tumours continued to grow in the untreated control mice they disappeared in the treated mice. The 100% reponse was so unexpected that Allison immediately repeated the experiment to rule out having made some mistake. The result was the same.
The fifth chapter throws some light on the question why researchers were so sceptical for so long about the idea that the immune system can effectively fight cancer. The central conceptual reason is that in order to interpret the results of certain experiments it is not enough to consider the typical cancer cell. Instead it is necessary to think on a population level and see the tumour as an ecosystem. When cancer cells are attacked in some way and the majority die there will be a few left over which are immune to that particular type of attack. That small population will then expand and the tumour will grow again. The genetic composition of a typical cell in the new tumour will be very different from that of the old one. In the case of an attack by the immune system this gives rise to the concept of ‘cancer immunoediting’. On the road to transforming the experimental results of Allison into a therapy there were further conceptual obstacles along the road. In the phase 2 clinical trial for an antibody against CTLA-4 run by Bristol-Myers-Squibb (which had taken over the company Medarex which had started the development of the drug) the criteria for success were badly chosen. They were based on what might have been good criteria for a chemotherapy but were not good for the new type of therapy. Success was based on the tumours of a certain percentage of patients having shrunk by a certain amount after three months. The problem was that the time scale (which had been chosen to limit the expense) was too short and tumour size was not the right thing to look at. It could be seen that he tumours of certain patients had grown but they reported that they were feeling better. It happened that a patient who was about to die called up months later, after the planned endpoint of the trial and said ‘I’m fine’. What is the explanation for these things? The first aspect is that the immune response required to attack the tumour takes a considerable time to develop and success needs more than three months. The other is that a bigger tumour does not necessarily mean more cancer cells. It can also mean that there are huge numbers of immune cells in the tumour. Imaging the size of the tumour misses that. A similar trial to that of BMS gave similar results and was abandoned. That the same did not happen with the BMS trial was apparently due to someone called Axel Hoos. He persuaded the company to extend the trial and introduced a better endpoint criterion, the proportion of patients who live for a certain time. This led to success and eventually to the approval of the drug ipilimumab. Its rate of success, in the case of metastatic melanoma, is that about 20% of the patients are cured (in the sense that the tumours go away and have not come back until today, the survival curve flattens out at a positive value). The side effects are formidable, due to autoimmune reactions.
Chapter six comes back to the therapy with PD-L1 with which the book started. The treatments with antibodies against PD-1 and PD-L1 have major advantages compared to those with CTLA-4. The success rate with metastatic melanoma can exceed 50% and the side effects are much less serious. The latter aspect has to do with the fact that in this case the mode of action is less to activate T cells in general than to sustain the activation of cells which are already attacking the tumour. This does not mean that treatments targetting CTLA-4 have been superceded. For certain types of cancer it can be better than those targetting PD-1 or PD-L1 and combinations may be better than either type of therapy alone. For the second class of drugs getting them on the market was also not easy. In the book it is described how this worked in the case of a drug developed by Genentech. It had to be decided whether the company wanted to develop this drug or a more conventional cancer therapy. The first was more risky but promised a more fundamental advance if successful. There was a showdown between the oncologists and the immunologists. After a discussion which lasted several hours the person responsible for the decision said ‘This is enough, we are moving forward’ and chose the risky alternative.
This post has already got quite long and it is time to break it off here. What I have described already covers the basic discussion in the book of the therapies using CTLA-4 and PD-1 or PD-L1. I will leave everthing else for another time.
Hydrobates 
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