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Hello and welcome to this month's Gynecologic Oncology Journal Podcast.
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I'm David Cohn, the editor-in-chief.
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And today you'll hear our podcasters that are featuring our editor's choice article and the accompanying editorial.
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I hope you do enjoy this podcast.
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The article and editorial we'll discuss are available at our homepage, gynecologic oncology-online.net.
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Thank you for listening.
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Hi everyone, I'm Alejandro Rauhein.
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I'm part of the editorial board of the Journal of Gynecology Oncology.
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On today's Gynecology Oncology Editor's Choice podcast is focused on the January 2026 article entitled Interstitial Lung Disease Targeted Therapies, a Society of Gynecology Concology Clinical Practice Statement.
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It is a pleasure to have the author of these papers on today's podcast, Dr.
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Charles Powell.
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He's a physician in the Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine and the Tisch Cancer Center at Mont Sine Medical School.
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Thank you so much, Charles, for being here with us.
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Pleasure to be with you, Alejandro, and it's been a pleasure working with your society membership on drafting and formulating this document.
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Yeah, this is certainly a very timely topic.
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You know, very excited to hear what you have to add from this article.
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And I would encourage everyone listening to really take a look at this article because it with all these new therapies that we are utilizing our patients, I think it's important to be informed.
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So, Charles, I'm gonna ask you a couple of questions and you know it will be great to hear your opinions based on what you and your team has described in this article.
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So ILD is described as a leading cause of treatment-related death in antibody conjugate trials.
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Uh, from your perspective, what are the most common missed opportunities for early detection in routine GYN oncology practice?
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And how can clinicians realistically close the gap?
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So the antibody drug conjugates have now been approved for several indications over the past six or seven years.
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And what we've learned in the field is that these drugs, as well as other advanced cancer therapeutics, can be remarkably effective and lead to responses in patients who were not able to achieve a response on prior regimens.
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So the therapeutic impact is clear.
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Load full transcript
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What we've also seen is that there's toxicity involved in patients who are treated with these drugs, and similar to toxicities that we see in all different cancer therapeutics.
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And the overall range of incidence of interstitial lung disease or pneumonitis, and we can use those terms interchangeably, is around 8 to 10%.
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However, these toxicities, although typically readily manageable, can lead to fatal cases in some individuals with fatality rates up to 3% in some of the early trials of antibody drug conjugates.
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And that is the area that, of course, we're focusing on.
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And one of the reasons for toxicity related to antibody drug conjugates is the cumulative toxicity that occurs if the pneumonitis or ILD is detected late.
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So then what are the missed opportunities that have been observed in these cases that can be mitigated and reduce the risk of this toxicity becoming fatal?
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I'd say we can focus perhaps on two potential missed opportunities.
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The first would be the inability to recognize that there is a new imaging abnormality in the chest on patients who are treated with antibody drug conjugates.
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And that can happen because of one or two reasons.
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One reason would be that there would not have been, in some cases, a baseline imaging study in the patient before they were exposed to antibody drug conjugates.
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And then, of course, the follow-up CT scan that would be done to assess treatment response may be abnormal, but it would be unclear whether that abnormality was new or old.
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So that means that it is imperative for any patient who's being considered for treatment with an antibody drug conjugate, or for that matter, any drug that is associated with a significant risk of lung toxicity to have examination of a baseline chest CT scan prior to administration of the dose.
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The second related reason for the inability to detect a clinically important finding on a chest CT scan would be the poor communication that sometimes is observed between the radiologist who is reviewing the study and the ability to communicate an abnormality or to recognize an abnormality in a manner that can be directed to the clinician before the administration of the next dose of the drug.
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There are two ways to mitigate that.
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One is to try and focus on having trained thoracic radiologists or radiologists who are trained in recognizing lung toxicity in patients receiving antibody drug conjugates or other advanced therapeutics to know when there is a finding that is clinically relevant in the setting.
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And then the next piece, which is equally important, is to have a channel of communication such that the clinician can have that information available as soon as possible and before the time of the next administration.
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We've seen many cases where the patient receives a dose of the study drug, and then afterwards it's determined that, yeah, there was a finding that was abnormal, but the clinician just didn't know.
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So that sums up the first missed opportunity, which is recognition and communication about abnormal imaging findings.
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And the second missed opportunity is when there's an abnormality detected by the patient that's not communicated to the team.
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And that can happen for one of two reasons.
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One is the patient may not appreciate that the change that they notice.
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And by change, what I'm focusing on here are changes that are associated with the development of interstitial lung disease.
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And some of the first changes they would notice, or first symptoms they would notice, would be dysthmia on exertion, doing activities that they previously could do before, or new cough that is lingering that they didn't have before.
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Those are the two common symptoms of early onset of interstitial lung disease: shortness of breath with exertion and new cough.
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If the patient notices that, they need to be educated that it's incredibly important for them to communicate with their clinical team that they have these new findings, and that can then lead to a prompt clinical evaluation to do the appropriate testing to evaluate the cause of those symptoms.
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Amongst the causes could be interstitial lung disease related to the drug, and then the appropriate actions can be taken.
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So education of the patients, having it be clear that it's so important to know as soon as possible for there to be a change so that the change can be managed quickly, and that'll offer the best opportunity for the patient to be safely and continuously treated with the effective drug.
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Awesome.
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So if I just to summarize, that it's very important is that it's for what I'm hearing is it's very important to have baseline imaging, usually a CT scan.
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And if there's anything abnormal in CT scan, just making sure that there's a clear communication between radiologists and the clinical team to make sure that appropriates take action and also patient education, if there are any changes, so they are aware, so they can communicate with the clinical team.
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Exactly.
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So I think some of the issues that we sometimes see in clinic is patients that have pre-existent lung disease
or baseline abnormalities.
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And I think in the article that is mentioned as a major risk factor.
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So what do you recommend we do if we have a patient that has one of these pre-existent lung disease and we're thinking about using an antibiotic conjugate?
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So we've published that pre-existing lung diseases, typically chronic lung diseases, such as COPD and prior fibrotic lung diseases, are associated with an increased risk for the development of antibody drug conjugate associated ILD.
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Most clinical trials that are evaluating these compounds will exclude patients who have active ILD, and that is reasonable.
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However, they will include patients who have other forms of chronic lung disease, such as COPD, and that is reasonable too.
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The toxicity, as we discussed before, is manageable.
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And so being able to treat patients even if they come in with chronic lung disease is important.
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We just need to be more vigilant than we might otherwise be if the patients had a pristine CT scan and no prior history of lung disease.
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And so that vigilance can take the form of more intense education for the patients, consideration of using at-home remote monitoring approaches, such as monitoring pulse oximetry oxygen levels with exercise, and also consideration of a more frequent monitoring scheme in the clinic for patients who have prior lung disease.
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This has the best chance of affording patients to have the opportunity to be treated with these drugs, even if they have prior lung disease.
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So have you been in a situation in which you know you get a patient referred to your clinic and you have recommended not the antibiotic conjugate because they have significant lung disease?
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Or put it the other way, is there any reason in terms of pulmonary status in which you would be against someone using an antibiotic conjugate with known risk factors for pneumonitis or uh ILD?
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The only situation I've encountered when I advise not to use the antibody drug conjugate or for that matter another advanced cancer therapeutic, we're in situations where the interstitial disease is still in progress.
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So if there's ongoing interstitial lung disease, that is not the time to start a drug that is associated with increased toxicity in the lung.
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Okay.
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Many patients that we're talking about, they don't have other therapeutic options.
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And so it's incredibly important for us to do whatever we can to safely be able to have that patient have the opportunity to be treated with the drug.
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Most of the time, if patients develop toxicity from an antibody drug conjugate, it's mild.
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It's grade one or two.
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That's typically 80% of the time, it's grade one or two.
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And so that suggests that if the patients do develop toxicity, we have an opportunity to address it quickly, hold the drug, treat with steroids as appropriate, and the patient would hopefully have the opportunity to be treated again once the event has resolved.
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So given that this is a manageable toxicity, given that there often are not other therapeutic options, then it's very unusual to recommend against using a drug such as an antibiotic drug conjugate in a patient who has prior lung disease.
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Great.
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So, you know, we have established that getting a baseline CT scan is extremely important, education is very important, and that most of the patients should be able to receive these kind of therapies.
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What do you recommend as routine follow-up for these patients that are getting these antibody conjugates with high risk of long toxicities?
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Like, do you recommend imaging?
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How often?
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And what are kind of like the imaging findings that would make you worry if something appears?
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That's a wonderful question.
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It comes up all the time.
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And we've learned a lot from the clinical trial setting.
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And in the clinical trial setting, patients would in the trials would typically have imaging performed every three cycles or so to assess therapeutic response.
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And those images are very helpful to determine if there is development of a new finding that would be suggestive of interstitial lung disease.
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We talk about findings that are suggestive of interstitial lung disease.
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What we're looking for typically is a new opacity.
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The most common opacity pattern is called organizing pneumonia.
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And in organizing pneumonia, the pattern is such that the patients will develop typically more than one peripheral rounded opacity in the outside of the lung.
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It often will have a solid component and then be surrounded by a ground glass component.
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That's the most common pattern.
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There are other patterns where one might see more diffuse haziness in bilateral lungs, more of a ground glass appearance that could be a non-specific interstitial pneumonitis pattern.
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And those are the typical types of patterns that we would see in patients
who develop pneumonitis.
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Other patterns include a hypersensitivity pneumonitis pattern that's concentrated in the upper lobes.
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And then there's another pattern called acute interstitial pneumonia or AIP, which is a severe form of drug-induced pneumonitis where there's bilateral consolidation and volume loss.
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That typically occurs late in patients, but the organized pneumonia is common.
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So to get back to the question at hand, what we've learned from the trials is that that frequency is sufficient.
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So then when we think about patients who are being treated in the post-marketing phase after the drugs are approved, the typical recommendation is that the imaging that is performed to assess response to the drug is sufficient in most patients who are being treated with antibody drug conjugates.
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Of course, the imaging needs to include the chest, which is particularly relevant for your specialty, where you may think that an abdominal pelvic CT may be sufficient if that's where the disease is restricted to.
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But here we're talking about it's important while you're doing that scan to include the chest as well at the same cadence.
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Now, for patients who are at higher risk, there may be utility to considering more intensive monitoring approaches.
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Those would include consideration of a more frequent monitoring strategy, although there's no data to support that at this point in time.
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And then to employ more frequent check-ins at home via the clinical team or consideration of remote monitoring approaches again.
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So imaging of the chest at least every three cycles would be the usual recommendation, unless there is something else that the clinical team is worried about.
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Yeah.
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And that's why it's just so important to reinforce the concept that we talked about up front, which is the importance of making sure we have educated the patient about feeling free and comfortable to report any change in symptoms, because that would prompt a more frequent check-in.
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Perfect.
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So let's just talk about kind of the management of ILD.
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So, you know, there are obviously different grades of uh pneumonitis.
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You know, if you can just summarize what are the usual regimens in terms of one patient has active lung disease.
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Sure.
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So for the principles of management of drug-associated ILD, the first principle is once there is suspicion of a new event of ILD, the first step is to suspend administration of the drug while evaluation is being performed.
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That evaluation would typically involve a history, a physical exam, testing for common viral pathogens that can cause some of the symptoms and imaging abnormalities that we're talking about, keeping in mind that drug-associated ILD is a diagnosis of exclusion, and keeping in mind that our patients are at increasing risk of developing infections.
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So we have to rule out infections as the cause of the new symptoms and imaging findings, of course.
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And so that can include our typical microbiology testing.
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We have to think about causes of interstitial changes, such as heart failure.
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There may be appropriate testing that needs to be done in that setting.
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And so we do that evaluation, and that's tailored to the patient's presentation and is done by the treating oncologist, sometimes and often in collaboration with specialists in related disciplines, infectious disease, pulmonary cardiology, et cetera.
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So that evaluation is ongoing.
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The drug is held.
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If it's determined that there is a drug-related ILD, then the treatment for that specific process should proceed.
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Now, the treatment is guided by the severity of the interstitial lung disease.
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And for standardization purposes, the severity is graded using the NCI, CTCAE scheme.
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And patients who are asymptomatic are graded as grade one.
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For patients who are symptomatic or patients who are treated specifically for their ILD, typically with prednisone here, then they're grade two.
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For patients who are hypoxemic or require hospitalization for the management of their ILD, they're grade three.
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For patients with respiratory failure who require ventilation, non-invasive ventilation, invasive ventilation, or high flow nasal cannula oxygen for support, those patients are grade four.
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And patients who expire grade five.
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For grade one patients, sometimes all that's needed is to hold the drug, wait for the pneumonitis to resolve, and then to proceed with the next dose of the drug, either on the same schedule or delayed, depending upon how long it takes for it to resolve.
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Some patients with grade one are found to benefit by treatment with steroids.
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Typically, that's used in patients who have extensive findings on their imaging studies, or patients, as we discussed before, who might be at high risk and not be as tolerable of the lung toxicity because of underlying chronic disease.
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And if those patients are grade one,
the typical dose here would be a half milligram per kilogram of prednisone.
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And typically those patients are treated for at least three to four weeks.
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And then once there's resolution of the symptoms and the imaging findings, then there's a taper performed.
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And that taper can take two to three weeks.
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For patients with grade two, it's a similar approach for those who are treated with prednisone.
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However, now we're talking about using doses similar to one milligram per kilogram of prednisone for the similar duration that we would use in grade one.
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For patients who are grade three and in the hospital, they're treated with IV steroids.
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Sometimes it's just IV hydrocartosone, or for more severe patients, high dose dexamethasone, high dose three days, a gram a day, and then followed by a taper of steroids.
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Similar dosing regimens are used in grade four patients.
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For patients who do not respond, there are at least two possibilities to consider.
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One possibility would be that the diagnosis may not be correct.
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So we have to revisit the diagnosis and think about other alternative etiologies for the imaging findings and the respiratory symptoms that the patient has.
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And then the other possibility is that perhaps the patients have what is considered to be steroid refractory drug-related ILD.
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There are multiple case reports and individual institution experience with other drugs that are used in this setting, infliximab, cell set, rituxan, with varying degrees of success from varying agents.
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There are no formal trials done to evaluate the efficacy of one rescue regimen versus another.
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But the general approach would be to use a rescue drug if patients have severe ILD that's not responding to high dose intravenous steroids.
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Is there a point in which, depending on the severity, that you would not recommend using the antibodoconjugate anymore?
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Is there like a cutoff that we use or a type of toxicity that we would say, you know, this patient should not ever see this kind of antibodoconjugate again?
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So the clinical trials protocols that were set up initially for the first approved antibody drug conjugate in the in in breast cancer setting, and that was trastusumabderxtacan, which is now used in many cancers, including ovarian and uterine cancer.
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The protocol was established such that if patients had symptomatic ILD, they were to be permanently discontinued from the drug.
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So that
set the precedent, if you will, that for patients with grade two and above, grade two meaning symptomatic ILD, those patients would not be retreated.
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Now, the question remained open as to whether or not retreatment was safe in grade one ILD patients.
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And we have data to address that.
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And those data were presented at ESMOBREST and they're published in ESMO breast as well.
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And the experience included 65 patients who had asymptomatic drug-related ILD who were treated with Trastuzumabderuxican.
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They were rechallenged after resolution of their ILD with Trastuzumaberoxican.
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And what was observed was that about a third of the patients did recur, got another episode of ILD, but that was managed.
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And none of the patients had severe grade four or five events in this cohort who were managed with.
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Retreatment with close follow-up, such that if there was a recurrent event, that was managed expeditiously as well.
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So we've learned that it is possible and safe to retreat patients who are asymptomatic with resolved ILD.
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And I think there's more clinical data emerging suggesting that in patients who have symptomatic ILD, who are successfully treated with steroids, there may be opportunities to consider retreatment in those patients too.
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The clinical protocols for the trials have not been modified to accommodate that.
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But I think it's fair to say that there are many clinicians who are evaluating this possibility and gaining experience in that.
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So it sounds like grade one, it would be fine to rechallenge.
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Grade three would not.
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I think that grade three and four for sure not.
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And grade two, there's this gray area that maybe for the right patient that might be responding very well to therapy, that has quick resolution of her some symptoms, you can discuss with the patient to restart.
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I uh yeah, absolutely.
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And I like that construct very much because you're specifically taking into consideration the response of the tumor to the drug.
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The the imperative to really find a way to continue to treat is high.
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And so I I like that construct very much.
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And and symptoms, and just to make sure that we are clear, do you refer the patient having any symptoms like cough, shortness of breath, all two requirements?
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Are those the symptoms that we're talking about to make it grade two?
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Or yeah, so the symptoms
that we'll uh focus on for grade two would be the cough and shortness of breath.
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If a patient has desaturation, then that that's moving them towards the grade three.
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Got it, okay.
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Where there'd be a higher risk of there being a clinically serious outcome should that ILD progress or worsen.
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And one other question about restarting ADC is that comes, I think, in clinic often is do you have to wait until the imaging findings have resolved, or or there's a lagging time in which the you know there's some imaging findings might be there for you know weeks, and we can restart the therapy before there's resolution of imaging findings.
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In my opinion, resolved means that there's no further progression and that the active components, specifically the ground glass components, have gone away.
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I don't expect the imaging study to look normal or to look as good as it did before the ILD event happened.
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The lung scars up and is often left with some reticular findings and some atelectasis.
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It won't be normal.
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But what we're looking for is evidence to suggest that the active component of the pneumonitis has stopped.
00:24:57.200 --> 00:25:02.079
In my mind, that's resolution, and that means it's time to consider retreatment.
00:25:02.400 --> 00:25:02.720
Got it.
00:25:02.960 --> 00:25:13.440
So we I think we've covered a lot of like clinical practice tips about managing ILD in patients uh taking uh or using ADCs.
00:25:13.680 --> 00:25:24.480
Just to close up, is there anything else that you want to add or do you foresee any changes in future clinical trials uh or management of ILD?
00:25:24.640 --> 00:25:29.359
Is there anything that we should expect to become in the next year or a couple of years?
00:25:29.680 --> 00:25:30.400
Yeah, sure.
00:25:30.640 --> 00:25:34.400
So I'd say there are two themes to think about here.
00:25:34.720 --> 00:26:04.799
One is what we've learned in the experience of developing the trials for the ADCs is that each time the ADCs are introduced in an organ system disease that is not accustomed to managing or evaluating or detecting lung toxicity, there's often early on an increased incidence of significant and severe ILD events that are often attributed to late recognition.
00:26:04.960 --> 00:26:22.720
Your field has taken this very seriously to the point where educational initiatives have been going on for a while now, so that clinicians who are treating patients with ovarian and uterine cancer using advanced cancer therapeutics are becoming really quite comfortable with early detection and management of ILD.
00:26:22.880 --> 00:26:24.079
And that's so important.
00:26:24.240 --> 00:26:33.680
So that's to me the most important step in ensuring the safe use of these promising drugs, and it'll extend as more drugs get developed.
00:26:33.920 --> 00:26:43.599
So it's gonna get dicier as we move forward because now the promising ADCs are being coupled with other drugs that are bewn to be promising.
00:26:43.680 --> 00:26:47.200
And some of those other drugs are associated with lung toxicity too.
00:26:47.279 --> 00:26:57.039
So now we're gonna be seeing patients who are gonna be on combination drugs and two, both drugs or three drugs could even be associated with the risk of ILD.
00:26:57.119 --> 00:27:06.799
So we that doesn't mean we have to do anything necessarily differently, but it just increases the importance of taking stock of everything that we're talking about today.
00:27:07.119 --> 00:27:13.680
Now, as a field, if we consider drug-induced ILD a field, there's a lot to learn.
00:27:13.839 --> 00:27:21.920
When we talked about risk for ILD, we use very rough clinical criterion, but we really don't know what makes one person more at risk than another person.
00:27:22.079 --> 00:27:26.720
We just have these clinical findings that are associated with increased risk.
00:27:26.799 --> 00:27:38.240
And so there's a lot of work to do to understand possible risk factors that we can identify and have a more precise view of what an individual's risk could be.
00:27:38.400 --> 00:27:47.279
It could be through work in genetics or epigenetics or evaluating for biomarkers associated with predisposition for lung injury.
00:27:47.440 --> 00:27:49.839
That could be in the blood, it can be on an imaging study.
00:27:50.079 --> 00:27:52.799
So there's a lot of work going on in that regard.
00:27:53.039 --> 00:27:56.880
The next big question is how do these drugs cause lung toxicity?
00:27:57.039 --> 00:28:18.079
We don't even know that because it's not clear whether the toxicity is on target because the epithelial tumor cells that are targeted by the antibody in the ADC is causing toxicity to those cells, or whether the ADC is taken up by macrophages and traffics elsewhere in the lung and causes toxicity in that matter.
00:28:18.319 --> 00:28:19.440
We don't know.
00:28:19.759 --> 00:28:29.839
And it's important to understand more about the mechanism so that we can use that for the design of future drugs and also in strategies for diagnosis and treatment.
00:28:30.000 --> 00:28:36.160
And then finally, when we talk about treatment of ILD, we're talking about using prednisone.
00:28:36.400 --> 00:28:46.160
That's an old standard drug, and it's a very broad therapeutic window for what prednisone attacks, but we don't have anything better and it works.
00:28:46.319 --> 00:28:47.119
So fine.
00:28:47.440 --> 00:28:58.160
We also have cases in which prednisone doesn't work, and so there's work to be done to understand strategies to manage patients who have severe ILD that does not respond to prednisone.
00:28:58.319 --> 00:29:04.079
So those are a couple of areas that really can benefit from increased understanding of this process.
00:29:04.400 --> 00:29:04.720
Great.
00:29:05.119 --> 00:29:07.440
This was an extremely informative talk.
00:29:07.680 --> 00:29:08.640
Thank you so much.
00:29:08.799 --> 00:29:12.079
You know, I think as you said, the future is very interesting.
00:29:12.160 --> 00:29:25.759
I think the combination of therapies of the ADCs and immunotherapy, if we are going to start seeing those combinations, it's going to be tricky to figure out, you know, if a patient comes with neumonitis, how you know how we're going to manage those patients.
00:29:25.920 --> 00:29:32.799
So, you know, I really, really appreciate all the the time, and I encourage everyone to take a look at the article.
00:29:33.039 --> 00:29:34.160
And thank you again.