The Role of Intratumoral Immunotherapy in Interventional Oncology

Rahul Sheth, MD, MD Anderson Cancer Center at The University of Texas, Houston, discusses the role of intratumoral delivery of immunotherapy within interventional oncology.

Dr Sheth explains that immunotherapy has advanced patient care within the field of oncology, but only for a small percentage of patients. The delivery of these agents through intratumoral means, by interventional oncologists and radiologists, may help to improve the response rates.

Transcript:

My name is Rahul Sheth. I'm one of the faculty at MD Anderson Cancer Center.

This is probably a topic that most people are not familiar with admittedly. It’s a very new field, very much up-and-coming. It’s something that we at MD Anderson are doing quite a lot of the early trials on.

The concept here is immunotherapy, which is a super-hot topic in oncology. It's been that way for at least the past decade. It has had some amazing home runs; you see patients who have gone from end-of-life to cure. The problem is that only occurs in a very small fraction of cancer patients. So the question is how do you increase that percentage of patients? One very compelling way to do it is something that actually relies heavily on what we bring to the table in [interventional radiology] IR, which is delivering those immunotherapies directly into the heart of the tumor.

We do this with image guidance, very targeted, and we can do it with these drugs that are otherwise unsafe for systemic deliveries. They're too strong. We've done many trials in this space and we've learned a lot of lessons.

I think the bottom line is the premise is very strong for these types of therapies. And if we can figure out how to do this in the right way, with the right drug, in the right patients, we have the opportunity to really revolutionize not just the future of IR, but even the future of oncology.