Monday, December 5, 2016

Immune System, Unleashed by Cancer Therapies, Can Attack Organs

As Chuck Peal lay in a Waterbury, Conn., emergency room one Sunday in early September, doctors furiously tried to make sense of his symptoms. Mr. Peal, 61, appeared to be dying, and they were not sure why.

He slipped in and out of consciousness, his blood pressure plummeted, his potassium levels soared and his blood sugar spiked to 10 times the normal level. A doctor suspected a heart attack, but uncertainty left him urgently researching the situation on his phone.

This was not a heart attack. Mr. Peal’s body was attacking itself, a severe reaction by his immune system that was a side effect of a seemingly miraculous cancer treatment aimed at saving his life.

In the seven weeks prior, doctors at Yale had combated Mr. Peal’s melanoma with two of the most promising drugs in cancer treatment today. These medicines work by stimulating the immune system to attack cancer as ferociously as it does other threats, like viruses and bacteria.

These so-called immunotherapy drugs have been hailed as a breakthrough in cancer treatment, attracting billions of research dollars and offering new hope to patients out of options. But as their use grows, doctors are finding that they pose serious risks that stem from the very thing that makes them effective. An unleashed immune system can attack healthy, vital organs: notably the bowel, the liver and the lungs, but also the kidneys, the adrenal and pituitary glands, the pancreas and, in rare cases, the heart.

Doctors at Yale believe immunotherapy is causing a new type of acute-onset diabetes, with at least 17 cases there so far, Mr. Peal’s among them. In cancer clinics around the world, and in drug trials, myriad other side effects are showing up. Studies are finding that severe reactions occur nearly 20 percent of the time with certain drugs, and in more than half of patients when some drugs are used in combination.

Another recent paper found that 30 percent of patients experienced “interesting, rare or unexpected side effects,” with a quarter of the reactions described as severe, life-threatening or requiring hospitalization. Some patients have died, including five in recent months in clinical trials of a new immunotherapy drug being tested by Juno Therapeutics Inc.

The upshot, oncologists and immunologists say, is that the medical field must be more vigilant as these drugs soar in popularity. And they say more research is needed into who is likely to have reactions and how to treat them.

“We are playing with fire,” said Dr. John Timmerman, an oncologist and immunotherapy researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, who recently lost a patient to side effects. The woman’s immunotherapy drugs had successfully “melted away” her cancer, he said, but some weeks later, she got cold and flulike symptoms and died in the emergency room from an inflammatory response that Dr. Timmerman described as “a mass riot, an uprising” of her immune system.

“We’ve heard about immunotherapy as God’s gift, the chosen elixir, the cure for cancer,” he said. “We haven’t heard much about the collateral damage.”

by Matt Richtel, NY Times |  Read more:
Image: NY Times