Evaluation of Cytokine-induced Killer (CIK) Cells as Therapy or Adjuvant Treatment for Advanced HCC

Summary

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the fifth most common malignancy in the world and the third most common cause of cancer-related deaths complicating liver cirrhosis in most cases. In Egypt, there has been a remarkable increase of the proportion of HCC among CLD patients from 4.0% to 7.2% over a decade. This rising proportion may be explained by the increasing risk factors such as the emergence of HCV over the same period of time, the contribution of HBV infection, improvement of the screening programs and diagnostic tools of HCC as well as the increased survival rate among patients with cirrhosis to allow time for some of them to develop HCC. The only curative treatment modalities for HCC are surgery, local ablation, and liver transplantation which have high recurrence rate either due to viral hepatitis infection or cirrhosis leading to low success rate and high economic burden. Unfortunately, the majority of patients have unresectable disease at diagnosis. So, patients search for palliative very expensive therapies including chemotherapy and radiotherapy which often fail to eradicate tumor lesions completely and tend to result in many adverse events.Thus, novel approaches for treatment options are needed for patients with advanced HCC . In recent years, immunotherapy has emerged as an efficacious treatment modality with encouraging efficacy and slight adverse events in cancer therapy \[Stroncek 2010\]. Cytokine-induced killer CIK cells therapy has been evaluated as an adoptive cell immunotherapy for cancer patients in a number of clinical trials and the promising efficacy of CIK cells on malignancies has been proved.

Timeline

Start

2015-10

Primary completion

2019-06

Completion

2019-10

Drugs

Indications