Hua Highlights Innovative Research With Immunotherapy in NETs

Welcome to OncLive On Air^®! I’m your host today, Jason Harris.

OncLive On Air^® is a podcast from OncLive^®, which provides oncology professionals with the resources and information they need to provide the best patient care. In both digital and print formats, OncLive^® covers every angle of oncology practice, from new technology to treatment advances to important regulatory decisions.

In today’s episode, I spoke with Xianxin Hua, MD, PhD, a professor of cancer biology with the Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, who joined me to talk about the treatment and diagnosis of neuroendocrine tumors (NETs) for OncLive’s Rare Cancers series.

ASCO estimates that there are 175,000 people living with NETs in the United States, with approximately 12,000 new diagnoses annually. NETs can appear in the lung, small intestine, rectum, colon, pancreas, or stomach. The 5-year overall survival rate for all NETs is 39.4%.

Despite a handful of successes, most notably atezolizumab (Tecentriq) plus carboplatin and etoposide for lung NETs, the history of NETs immunotherapy has been disappointing. Dr Hua is leading a team at Penn that has developed chimeric antigen (CAR) T cells targeting CDH17, a cell surface adhesion protein that is frequently upregulated in NETs and gastrointestinal tumors. In preclinical models, the anti-CDH17 CAR T cells eliminated NET cells while sparing normal epithelial cells.

In our exclusive interview, Dr Hua talked about the unmet need in NETs, explained the difficulty of detecting NETs, and highlighted his study findings.

That’s all we have for today! Thanks again to my guest, Dr Hua, and thank you for listening to this episode of OncLive On Air^®. Check back on Mondays and Thursdays for exclusive interviews with leading experts in the oncology field.

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