Monoclonal Antibody-Based Immunotherapy and Its Role in the Development of Cardiac Toxicity

Simple Summary The application of immunotherapies to treat cancer patients has significantly improved over the last two decades and extended many patients' life spans. Monoclonal antibodies are synthetic proteins employed as immunotherapies to treat and manage cancers that require a complete understanding of cancer biology and the host's immune system. However, activated immune responses, by monoclonal antibodies, can target nonspecific cancer cells, causing frequent immune-related adverse events that can lead to permanent disorders among cancer patients. The immune-related adverse events pose a risk of cardiac toxicity that includes hypertension, heart failure, arrhythmias, and left ventricular dysfunction during and after monoclonal antibody immunotherapy. Moreover, with the mortality rate of 47% attributed to heart disease and cancer, it is imperative to employ reliable, sensitive, and clinically relevant models for efficacy and safety assessment of immune drugs for cancer and the prevention of cardiotoxicities. Immunotherapy is one of the most effective therapeutic options for cancer patients. Five specific classes of immunotherapies, which includes cell-based chimeric antigenic receptor T-cells, checkpoint inhibitors, cancer vaccines, antibody-based targeted therapies, and oncolytic viruses. Immunotherapies can improve survival rates among cancer patients. At the same time, however, they can cause inflammation and promote adverse cardiac immune modulation and cardiac failure among some cancer patients as late as five to ten years following immunotherapy. In this review, we discuss cardiotoxicity associated with immunotherapy. We also propose using human-induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes/ cardiac-stromal progenitor cells and cardiac organoid cultures as innovative experimental model systems to (1) mimic clinical treatment, resulting in reproducible data, and (2) promote the identification of immunotherapy-induced biomarkers of both early and late cardiotoxicity. Finally, we introduce the integration of omics-derived high-volume data and cardiac biology as a pathway toward the discovery of new and efficient non-toxic immunotherapy.

Automated summary

Immunotherapy has significantly improved cancer treatment over the past two decades, but can also lead to immune-related adverse events, including cardiac toxicity. Reliable models are necessary for evaluating efficacy and safety, while innovative experimental systems can help identify biomarkers of immunotherapy-induced cardiotoxicity and lead to the discovery of new non-toxic immunotherapies.