Question ID: WS-63
Submitted by: Ignacio Melero
February 12, 2011
Is surgical tumor debulking a good idea before starting immunotherapy of cancer? In clinical oncology tumor debulking is restricted to a few tumor in which there is proof of significant benefit from the surgeries (i.e ovarian carcinomas) or when local complications are troublesome (i. e: colorrectal or kidney cancer). Otherwise surgery is confined to the cases in which curative erradication is considered feasible. However, the tumor mass is reach in factors and cells that locally and sistemically repress the immune response against cancer. Surgical debulking should help to diminish the amount of target malignant tissue to be destroyed by teh immune response and to reduce the immunosupressive factors while the immnotherapies are launched. The only way to answer this question is the performance of clinical trials in which teh same immunotherapy strategy is tested with and without the surgical operation.
Average Score: 4.5
 (2 evaluations)Provocativeness - 5.0
Novelty - 4.0
Public Health Significance - 4.5
Feasibility - 4.5
|
Comments
Submitted By Yong Qian
Surgical tumor debulking may have the following benefits depending on the stage of cancer (earlier better): 1)helping the patient's immune system to recover from the suppression of tumor associated factors, 2)less burden for the immunotherapy, 3)more importantly providing a source for advanced immunotherapy that based on the debulked tumor antigens using the same patient's recovered immune system or a healthy people's immune system for cancer cell specific polyclonal antibody production for potential cure.
