WIKIMEDIA, NATIONAL HUMAN GENOME RESEARCH INSTITUTE Checkpoint inhibitor drugs, those that pull the brakes off the immune system, can cause dramatic improvements in cancer patients, but the benefits are far from universal. In the case of atezolizumab (Tecentriq), for instance, just about a quarter of patients respond to the medication.
To find ways to boost the proportion of patients who respond to checkpoint inhibitors, researchers have turned to combination therapies. At the American Association for Cancer Research meeting in Chicago today (April 16), researchers from Genentech presented data showing atezolizumab combined with an antibody that interferes with transforming growth factor B (TGF-β) shrinks bladder cancer in mice that model recalcitrant tumors. The team had also published its results in February in Nature.
Atezolizumab was given accelerated approval by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2016 to treat bladder cancer. The drug is a monoclonal antibody that works by binding to, and thereby inhibiting, programmed death-ligand 1 (PD-L1), a protein that ordinarily tamps down immune responses. To strategize ways of increasing the proportion of patients ...
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