How Immunotherapy Can Make a Difference for Your Patients

Course overview

Osteosarcoma accounts for up to 85 percent of all primary bone tumors in dogs. Yet, there have been relatively few advancements in treatment options to improve patient outcomes. Until now, treatment options have been limited to therapeutic amputation to relieve pain and remove tumor burden. Without further medical intervention such as 4-6 dose carboplatin, median survival time for dogs with no metastatic disease at diagnosis has been shown to be 134 days -4 months. With carboplatin, median survival time has been shown to be 9 months. The American Cancer Society website defines Immunotherapy as treatment that uses certain parts of the immune system to fight diseases such as cancer. Immunotherapies that have achieved considerable success in the human health arena include checkpoint inhibitors and adoptive cell therapies such as chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapies and TIL (tumor infiltrating lymphocytes). These are finally becoming available in veterinary medicine. In this program we will discuss the history and background of immunotherapy development, learn how to identify and distinguish between current cancer immunotherapy technologies, and discuss the conduct of the ELIAS Cancer Immunotherapy adoptive cell therapy protocol.