[Immunotherapies and targeted therapies in medical oncology]

Abstract

New immunotherapies, also called "immune checkpoints", are promising and showed interesting antitumoral activities in particular in advanced setting of melanoma, clear cell renal cancer or non-small cell lung carcinoma. These treatments include ipilimumab, anti-PD-1 and anti-PD-L1. There is a strong rational for combination of immunotherapies and targeted therapies. This review is dedicated to expose the theorical issues and preclinical data of such combinations. This review examined the impact of immunotherapies on transduction pathways and modification of immunity related to targeted therapies. First clinical data form early drug development studies showed the difficulties observed with such combination and limitating toxicities. Finally, potential interesting combinations are overviewed with an emphasis on sequential treatments.

Keywords: clinical trial/phase I; drug therapy/combination; immunotherapy; molecular targeted therapy.