J Dig Cancer Res.  2022 Jun;10(1):22-30. 10.52927/jdcr.2022.10.1.22.

Recent Progress in Immunotherapy for Advanced Gastric Cancer

• Sohn BS

• KMID: 2530345
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.52927/jdcr.2022.10.1.22

Abstract

Immune checkpoint inhibition has been established as a new treatment option for various types of carcinoma, and many clinical trials are being actively conducted as a treatment for advanced or metastatic gastric cancer, either as a monotherapy with an immune checkpoint inhibitor or as a combination therapy with standard chemotherapy. In the CheckMate-649 clinical trial to confirm the efficacy of the combination of nivolumab and chemotherapy (FP) in advanced gastric cancer and gastroesophageal junction cancer, nivolumab group showed improvement in overall survival in programmed death ligand 1-positive cancer patients compared with placebo group. Also, the combination therapy of pembrolizumab, trastuzumab and chemotherapy (FP) in first-line treatment was tested through the KEYNOTE-811 trial. The pembrolizumab group showed 22.7% of improvement in objective response rate compared with placebo group. Accordingly, the combination of nivolumab/pembrolizumab with standard chemotherapy was approved for the first-line treatment. In KEYNOTE-059 trials for patients with progressive disease after at least two lines of chemotherapy, pembrolizumab monotherapy showed improvement in objective response rate and overall survival, and the use of pembrolizumab was approved for the third-line or more treatment. In this article, we review the result of clinical trials related to immune checkpoint inhibitors that have been recently introduced in the treatment of gastric cancer.

Keyword

Immunotherapy; Immune checkpoint inhibitor; Gastric cancer; biomarker; Programmed cell death 1; Programmed cell death ligand 1