Efficacy of Cancer Combination Therapies may be Due to Independent Drug Action

Independent drug action and not synergistic (one drug enhances the clinical activity of another drug) or additive effects (clinical benefit is the sum of multiple drugs in the combination) of combination therapies may improve outcomes as per a retrospective study published in the journal Clinical Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association of Cancer Research (AACR). These findings may have important implications for future cancer clinical trial design involving immune checkpoint inhibitors.

Immune checkpoint inhibition is one of the common forms of cancer immunotherapy that has greatly improved outcomes for certain patients. However, most patients do not benefit from this treatment.

The present study shows that combining immune checkpoint inhibitors either with each other or with other cancer therapies has improved responses in many cases, leading to the approval of various combinations by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

This has invited more exploration of combination therapies for cancer.

“Our study revealed that the efficacies of all but one of the combination therapies we analyzed occurred through independent drug action, and not through synergy or additivity,” says first author Adam Palmer, PhD, Harvard Medical School.

“To be clear, we are not suggesting that these combinations are ineffective. We agree that the combinations are clinically effective; what we are proposing is that their effectiveness is through a different mechanism than was previously thought. These findings have important implications for preclinical and clinical research,” says senior and corresponding author Peter Sorger, PhD, a professor of systems biology at Harvard Medical School.

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Source-Medindia