Frega Stefano, Dal Maso Alessandro, Pasello Giulia, Cuppari Lea, Bonanno Laura, Conte PierFranco, Evangelista Laura
Oncology 2 Unit, Department of Medical Oncology, Veneto Institute of Oncology IOV - IRCCS, 35128 Padova, Italy.
Department of Surgery, Oncology and Gastroenterology, University of Padua, 35128 Padova, Italy.
Cancers (Basel). 2020 May 21;12(5):1303. doi: 10.3390/cancers12051303.
The global immuno-oncology pipeline has grown progressively in recent years, leading cancer immunotherapy to become one of the main issues of the healthcare industry. Despite their success in the treatment of several malignancies, immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) perform poorly in others. Again, ICIs action depends on such a multitude of clinico-pathological features, that the attempt to predict responders/long-responders with ad-hoc built immunograms revealed to be quite complex. In this landscape, the role of nuclear medicine might be crucial, with first interesting evidences coming from small case series and pre-clinical studies. Positron-emission tomography (PET) techniques provide functional information having a predictive and/or prognostic value in patients treated with ICIs or adoptive T-cell therapy. Recently, a characterization of the tumor immune microenvironment (TiME) pattern itself has been shown to be feasible through the use of different radioactive tracers or image algorithms, thus adding knowledge about tumor heterogeneity. Finally, nuclear medicine exams permit an early detection of immune-related adverse events (irAEs), with on-going clinical trials investigating their correlation with patients' outcome. This review depicts the recent advances in molecular imaging both in terms of non-invasive diagnosis of TiME properties and benefit prediction from immunotherapeutic agents.
近年来，全球免疫肿瘤学研发管线不断发展，使得癌症免疫疗法成为医疗行业的主要议题之一。尽管免疫检查点抑制剂（ICI）在治疗多种恶性肿瘤方面取得了成功，但在其他肿瘤中效果不佳。此外，ICI的作用取决于众多临床病理特征，因此试图通过专门构建的免疫图谱来预测反应者/长期反应者的情况非常复杂。在这种情况下，核医学的作用可能至关重要，一些小型病例系列研究和临床前研究已得出了初步有趣的证据。正电子发射断层扫描（PET）技术可为接受ICI或过继性T细胞疗法治疗的患者提供具有预测和/或预后价值的功能信息。最近，通过使用不同的放射性示踪剂或图像算法，已证明对肿瘤免疫微环境（TiME）模式本身进行特征描述是可行的，从而增加了对肿瘤异质性的了解。最后，核医学检查能够早期发现免疫相关不良事件（irAE），目前正在进行临床试验以研究其与患者预后的相关性。本综述描述了分子成像在TiME特性的非侵入性诊断和免疫治疗药物疗效预测方面的最新进展。
