Medicine/Health
Evaluating the Efficacy of Immunotherapeutic Treatments in Carcinoma of the Vulva and Identifying Potential Predictive Biomarkers
Caroline Shi
Medicine/Health
Caroline Shi
Vaginal and vulvar squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) are tumors that are difficult to treat in advanced/recurrent/metastatic settings. When advanced, the prognosis is poor, and the treatment of advanced SCC has not seen improvement in survival rate in the past 20 years. They represent 5% of all malignant tumors in the female genital tract and behave in unpredictable, aggressive manners. Vulvar cancer is most often treated with surgery and radiation, with post-operational chemotherapy if necessary. However, these treatments are often not entirely effective. Additionally, there are currently no confirmed biological or targeted agents for the management of vulvar cancer. In previous studies, treatments involving pembrolizumab and nivolumab to treat patients with advanced cervical cancer demonstrated promising results, including increased objective response rate, progression-free survival, and overall survival. As a result of limited clinical trials and research, the current standards for treating metastatic vulvar cancer are based on treatments for cervical cancer. PD-L1 has been seen to be unregulated in advanced cervical cancer. Thus, in the study, we aim to evaluate the efficacy of pembrolizumab monotherapy, nivolumab monotherapy, and combined therapy in treating vaginal/vulvar cancer. Furthermore, we aim to run a diagnostic test for the expression of PD-L1 to evaluate its potential as a predictive biomarker in conjunction with evaluating each immunotherapy treatment. We propose a study comparing a control treatment, pembrolizumab treatment, nivolumab treatment, and pembrolizumab with nivolumab treatment on SCC cells, stained for PD-L1 expression. We hope to see significant tumor cell reduction in SCCs treated with pembrolizumab and nivolumab as well as upregulated PD-L1 expression.