Boosting the abscopal effect with chemoradiotherapy/immunotherapy combination in metastatic cervical cancer: a case report

Plain language summaryCheckpoint inhibitors are a type of treatment for cancer. They can be used alone or together with chemotherapy, and they have recently been approved for the treatment of advanced and recurrent cervical cancer. This article looks at how these checkpoint inhibitors can be used with another treatment called chemoradiotherapy. This treatment combines chemotherapy and radiation therapy. This is to see whether using checkpoint inhibitors with chemoradiotherapy can help even more. Here we report a patient with cervical cancer that had spread to the lungs. They received treatment with chemotherapy, radiation therapy and checkpoint inhibitors. The good news is that the cancer went away completely after this treatment. The patient continued to receive checkpoint inhibitors to keep the cancer from coming back. It has been 26 months, and the patient is still cancer-free. This case shows that using checkpoint inhibitors with chemoradiotherapy can be a very effective treatment for cervical cancer that has spread to other parts of the body. The prognosis for patients with distant-organ metastatic cervical cancer (CC) is poor owing to the lack of effective treatment modalities. We present a case of CC with lung metastasis that achieved partial remission of the cervical mass after two cycles of chemotherapy, while the pulmonary nodules remained stable. Moreover, the level of the tumor marker squamous cell carcinoma antigen was slightly higher than before. The patient was recommended to receive pelvic concurrent chemoradiotherapy combined with camrelizumab. Remarkably, after undergoing 16 cycles of immunotherapy, the patient's primary cervical mass and pulmonary nodules were in complete remission, and the tumor marker had returned to normal levels. This inspiring case demonstrates that a combination of chemo-/radio-/immunotherapy can be effective in treating lung metastatic CC and can also enhance the abscopal effect.