Developing a Roadmap for Interventional Oncology

Minimally invasive biopsy-based diagnostics in support of precision cancer medicine

Precision cancer medicine (PCM) to support the treatment of solid tumors requires minimally invasive diagnostics. Here, we describe the development of fine-needle aspiration biopsy-based (FNA) molecular cytology which will be increasingly important in diagnostics and adaptive treatment. We provide support for FNA-based molecular cytology having a significant potential to replace core needle biopsy (CNB) as a patient-friendly potent technique for tumor sampling for various tumor types. This is not only because CNB is a more traumatic procedure and may be associated with more complications compared to FNA-based sampling, but also due to the recently developed molecular methods used with FNA. Recent studies show that image-guided FNA in combination with ultrasensitive molecular methods also offers opportunities for characterization of the tumor microenvironment which can aid therapeutic decisions. Here we provide arguments for an increased implementation of molecular FNA-based sampling as a patient-friendly diagnostic method, which may, due to its repeatability, facilitate regular sampling that is needed during different treatment lines, to provide tumor information, supporting treatment decisions, shortening lead times in healthcare, and benefit healthcare economics.

Act Local, Think Global: IR and Its Role in Immuno-Oncology in Hepatocellular Carcinoma

Interventional oncology (IO) is evolving rapidly. The treatment landscape of liver cancer is changing rapidly, and immunotherapy combinations have become the standard of care for most patients with advanced hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). The higher response rates and improved outcomes observed with these agents are leading to initiatives for their earlier incorporation in the course of the disease, including in combination with ablative and transarterial treatment options. The intersectionality of systemic therapies and liver-directed approaches has allowed IO to be at the center stage of a rapidly evolving dynamic field across all stages of HCC. This review article will address the current state of treatment for advanced HCC and the incorporation of these options in both localized and advanced stages along with IO to further enhance the observed benefits.

[CT-guided local ablative interventions]

BACKGROUND

Applicator-based local ablations under computed tomography (CT) guidance for the treatment of malignant tumors have found their way into clinical routine.

OBJECTIVES

The basic principles of the different ablation technologies and their specific clinical field of application are described.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

A comprehensive literature review regarding applicator-based ablation techniques was carried out.

RESULTS

Radiofrequency (RFA) and microwave ablation (MWA) represent two image-guided hyperthermal treatment modalities that have been established for the treatment of primary and secondary liver malignancies. In addition, both techniques are also applied for local ablative therapy of lung- and kidney tumors. Cryoablation is mainly used for the local ablation of T1 kidney cancer and due to its intrinsic analgetic characteristics for application in the musculoskeletal system. Nonresectable pancreatic tumors and centrally located liver malignancies can be treated with irreversible electroporation. This nonthermal ablation modality preserves the structure of the extracellular matrix including blood vessels and ducts. Technical advancements in the field of CT-guided interventions include the use of robotics, different tracking and navigation technologies and the use of augmented reality with the goal to achieve higher precision, shorter intervention time and thereby reduce radiation exposure.

CONCLUSION

Percutaneous ablation techniques under CT guidance are an essential part of interventional radiology and they are suited for local treatment of malignancies in most organ systems.

Liquid Biopsy-Guided Interventional Oncology: A Proof of Concept with a Special Focus on Radiotherapy and Radiology

Simple Summary

Over the last decade radiology interventions for tumor ablation have steadily increased and new procedures of interventional Oncology (IO) have been developed. Minimal residual disease (MRD) management and its quantification has a critical role to assess the efficacy or failure of the treatment adopted.The assessment of the MRD depends by multiple and repetitive measurements performed through a no invasive procedure like as Liquid biopsy (LB). LB is a rapidly evolving technology with potentially relevant consequences in the management of patients with cancer. Despite its high potential, the LB approach cannot give spatial information and still lacks of standardization and required specificity and sensitivity to be extensively implemented in the routine clinical practice. The review is aimed at investigating how LB can monitor the effects of locoregional treatment highliting the potential synergies between interventional techniques and LB to improve cancer patient’ management. The review suggests combining Interventional techniques and LB technology could improve LB overcoming its sensitivity limitations. Furthermore, LB techniques may enhance the outcomes of minimally invasive loco-regional treatments not only via ongoing periodic MRD monitoring of a patient during and subsequent to IO procedures.

Abstract

Although the role of liquid biopsy (LB) to measure minimal residual disease (MRD) in the treatment of epithelial cancer is well known, the biology of the change in the availability of circulating biomarkers arising throughout treatments such as radiotherapy and interventional radio-oncology is less explained. Deep knowledge of how therapeutic effects can influence the biology of the release mechanism at the base of the biomarkers available in the bloodstream is needed for selecting the appropriate treatment-induced tumor circulating biomarker. Combining existing progress in the LB and interventional oncology (IO) fields, a proof of concept is provided, discussing the advantages of the traditional risk assessment of relapsing lesions, limitations, and the timing of detection of the circulating biomarker. The current review aims to help both interventional radiologists and interventional radiation oncologists evaluate the possibility of drawing a tailor-made board of blood-based surveillance markers to reveal subclinical diseases and avoid overtreatment.

Synergizing liver systemic treatments with interventional oncology: friend or foe?

Interventional radiology techniques provide excellent local tumor control for small tumors in various organs, but several limitations can hamper the oncological outcomes such as the tumor size or the number of lesions. Technical improvements, optimal patient selection and combination with systemic therapies, including immune checkpoint inhibitors, have been successfully developed to overcome these barriers.In this setting, chemotherapy and targeted therapies aim to diminish the tumor burden in addition to local treatments, while immunotherapies may have a synergistic effect in terms of mechanism of action on the tumor cell as well as the immune environment, with multiple treatment combinations being available. Finally, interventional Rrdiology treatments often increase tumor antigen exposure to the immune system, and thus stimulate a specific antitumor immune response that can act beyond the treated site. Notwithstanding their many benefits, combination treatment may also result in complications, the most feared may be auto-immune-related adverse events.In early studies, several combined therapies have shown promising levels of safety and efficacy, particularly in hepatocellular carcinoma.This review provides a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of results of combined therapies for primary and secondary liver malignancies. Recent advances and future perspectives will be discussed.

Expanding the role of interventional oncology for advancing precision immunotherapy of solid tumors

Adoptive cell therapy with chimeric antigen receptors (CAR) T cells has proven effective for hematologic malignancies, but success in solid tumors has been impeded by poor intratumoral infiltration, exhaustion of effector cells from antigen burden, and an immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment. Results from recent clinical trials and preclinical studies lend promising evidence of locoregional approaches for CAR T cell delivery, priming the tumor microenvironment, and performing adjuvant therapies that sustain T cell activity. Interventional oncology is a subspeciality of interventional radiology where imaging guidance is used to perform percutaneous and catheter-directed procedures for localized, non-surgical therapy or interrogation of solid tumors. Interventional oncology provides unique synergies with immunotherapy, which has been well-studied to improve treatment efficacy while reducing toxicities associated with systemic treatment. Besides aiding in CAR T cell delivery, priming, or the stimulation of the tumor microenvironment to promote effector survival and function, interventional oncology can also aid in the monitoring of treatment response through selective, multiplex tumor sampling and catheter-based venous sampling. This review presents an overview of interventional oncology, its various procedures, and its potential for advancing CAR T cell immunotherapy of solid tumors.

Microneedle arrays integrated with living organisms for smart biomedical applications

Various living organisms have proven to influence human health significantly, either in a commensal or pathogenic manner. Harnessing the creatures may remarkably improve human healthcare and cure the intractable illness that is challenged using traditional drugs or surgical approaches. However, issues including limited biocompatibility, poor biosafety, inconvenience for personal handling, and low patient compliance greatly hinder the biomedical and clinical applications of living organisms when adopting them for disease treatment. Microneedle arrays (MNAs), emerging as a promising candidate of biomedical devices with the functional diversity and minimal invasion, have exhibited great potential in the treatment of a broad spectrum of diseases, which is expected to improve organism-based therapies. In this review, we systemically summarize the technologies employed for the integration of MNAs with specific living organisms including diverse viruses, bacteria, mammal cells and so on. Moreover, their applications such as vaccination, anti-infection, tumor therapy and tissue repairing are well illustrated. Challenges faced by current strategies, and the perspectives of integrating more living organisms, adopting smarter materials, and developing more advanced technologies in MNAs for future personalized and point-of-care medicine, are also discussed. It is believed that the combination of living organisms with functional MNAs would hold great promise in the near future due to the advantages of both biological and artificial species.

CIRSE Clinical Practice Manual

Background

Interventional radiology (IR) has come a long way to a nowadays UEMS-CESMA endorsed clinical specialty. Over the last decades IR became an essential part of modern medicine, delivering minimally invasive patient-focused care.

Purpose

To provide principles for delivering high quality of care in IR.

Methods

Systematic description of clinical skills, principles of practice, organizational standards and infrastructure needed for the provision of professional IR services.

Results

There are IR procedures for almost all body parts and organs, covering a broad range of medical conditions. In many cases IR procedures are the mainstay of therapy, e.g. in the treatment of hepatocellular carcinoma. In parallel the specialty moved from the delivery of a procedure towards taking care for a patient’s condition with the interventional radiologists taking ultimate responsibility for the patient’s outcomes.

Conclusions

The evolution from a technical specialty to a clinical specialty goes along with changing demands on how clinical care in IR is provided. The CIRSE Clinical Practice Manual provides interventional radiologist with a starting point for developing his or her IR practice as a clinician.

Multiplex immune protein profiling of fine-needle aspirates from patients with non-small-cell lung cancer reveals signatures associated with PD-L1 expression and tumor stage

Biomarker signatures identified through minimally invasive procedures already at diagnosis of non‐small‐cell lung cancer (NSCLC) could help to guide treatment with immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICI). Here, we performed multiplex profiling of immune‐related proteins in fine‐needle aspirate (FNA) samples of thoracic lesions from patients with NSCLC to assess PD‐L1 expression and identify related protein signatures. Transthoracic FNA samples from 14 patients were subjected to multiplex antibody‐based profiling by proximity extension assay (PEA). PEA profiling employed protein panels relevant to immune and tumor signaling and was followed by Qlucore^® Omics Explorer analysis. All lesions analyzed were NSCLC adenocarcinomas, and PEA profiles could be used to monitor 163 proteins in all but one sample. Multiple key immune signaling components (including CD73, granzyme A, and chemokines CCL3 and CCL23) were identified and expression of several of these proteins (e.g., CCL3 and CCL23) correlated to PD‐L1 expression. We also found EphA2, a marker previously linked to inferior NSCLC prognosis, to correlate to PD‐L1 expression. Our identified protein signatures related to stage included, among others, CXCL10 and IL12RB1. We conclude that transthoracic FNA allows for extensive immune and tumor protein profiling with assessment of putative biomarkers of important for ICI treatment selection in NSCLC.

Interventional Radiology for Local Immunotherapy in Oncology

Human intratumoral immunotherapy (HIT-IT) is under rapid development, with promising preliminary results and high expectations for current phase III trials. While outcomes remain paramount for patients and the referring oncologists, the technical aspects of drug injection are critical to the interventional radiologist to ensure optimal and reproducible outcomes. The technical considerations for HIT-IT affect the safety, efficacy, and further development of this treatment option. Image-guided access to the tumor allows the therapeutic index of a treatment to be enhanced by increasing the intratumoral drug concentration while minimizing its systemic exposure and associated on-target off-tumor adverse events. Direct access to the tumor also enables the acquisition of cancer tissue for sequential sampling to better understand the pharmacodynamics of the injected immunotherapy and its efficacy through correlation of immune responses, pathologic responses, and imaging tumor response. The aim of this article is to share the technical insights of HIT-IT, with particular consideration for patient selection, lesion assessment, image guidance, and technical injection options. In addition, the organization of a standard patient workflow is discussed, so as to optimize HIT-IT outcome and the patient experience.

Cost effectiveness and the role of the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE) in interventional radiology

Healthcare expenditure is continually increasing and projected to accelerate in the future, with an increasing proportion being spent on interventional radiology. The role of cost effectiveness studies in ensuring the best allocation of resources is discussed, and the role of National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE) in determining this. Issues with demonstrating cost effectiveness have been discussed, and it has been found that there is significant scope for improving cost effectiveness, with suggestions made for how this can be achieved. In this way, more patients can benefit from better treatment given limited healthcare budgets.

The evolution of interventional oncology in the 21st century

Interventional oncology (IO) has proven to be highly efficient in the local therapy of numerous malignant tumors in addition to surgery, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy. Due to the advent of immune-oncology with the possibility of tumor control at the molecular and cellular levels, a system change is currently emerging. This will significantly rule oncology in the coming decades. Therefore, one cannot think about IO in the 21st century without considering immunology. For IO, this means paying much more attention to the immunomodulatory effects of the interventional techniques, which have so far been neglected, and to explore the synergistic possibilities with immuno-oncology. It can be expected that the combined use of IO and immuno-oncology will help to overcome the limitations of the latter, such as limited local effects and a high rate of side-effects. To do this, however, sectoral boundaries must be removed and interdisciplinary research efforts must be strengthened. In case of success, IO will face an exciting future.

Glass Chemistry to Analyze Human Cells under Adverse Conditions

Emerging point-of-care diagnostic tests capable of analyzing whole mammalian cells often rely on the attachment of harvested cells to glass surfaces for subsequent molecular characterization. We set out to develop and optimize a kit for the diagnosis of lymphoma in low- and middle-income countries where access to advanced healthcare testing is often absent or prone to error. Here, we optimized a process for the lyophilization of neutravidin-coated glass and cocktails of antibodies relevant to lymphoma diagnosis to establish long-term stability of reagents required for point-of-care cell capture technology. Lyophilized glass slides showed no decline in their performance compared to freshly prepared neutravidin glass and preserved capture efficiency for 5 weeks under easily attainable storage conditions. We demonstrate the successful performance of the low-cost, lyophilized kit in a cell capture assay to enable true point-of-care analyses under adverse conditions. We anticipate that the strategy can be expanded to other cancer cell types or cell-derived vesicle analysis.