Opdivo Review – Right For You?

Opdivo is a drug that was recently approved by the FDA for the treatment of lung cancer. Find out everything you need to know about Opdivo and its lung cancer treatment today in our review.

What is Opdivo?

Opdivo is a drug that was approved by the FDA in March, 2015 to treat a specific type of lung cancer.

Opdivo is the brand name for the generic nivolumab.

The FDA approval for Opdivo is a big deal: the FDA approved Opdivo months earlier than expected. The drug’s approval was expedited based on how quickly it improved survival rates.

Some news stories discussed how Opdivo was approved by the FDA for the broad treatment of all types of lung cancer. In reality, however, the drug was only approved for patients with a very specific type and stage of disease.

As Jennifer King of the Lung Cancer Alliance explains,

“…the FDA’s approval of Opdivo was only for patients with a very specific type and stage of disease: squamous, non-small cell lung cancer that has already metastasized and is already resistant to platinum-based chemotherapy (like cisplatin, carboplatin, or oxaliplatin). This is only a small percentage of the patients living with lung cancer.”

How does Opdivo work to treat lung cancer? Let’s take a closer look at this drug.

How Does Opdivo Work?

Opdivo, like many anti-cancer drugs emerging onto the market, works as an immunotherapy or immuno-oncology drug.

Traditional cancer treatments have focused on killing cancer cells. Modern cancer treatments like Opdivo, however, are designed to help your body’s normal immune system work more effectively so that your own body can kill cancer cells.

Opdivo is in a specific class of immunotherapy drugs called checkpoint inhibitors. These drugs are called checkpoint inhibitors because they utilize a function in your body’s immune system called “checkpoints”. Your body’s natural checkpoints prevent immune cells from attacking everything.

Checkpoints are like the guards that selectively let immune cells through to a battlefield. If the immune cells have a legitimate reason to go fight on the battlefield (like a foreign invader they need to fight), the checkpoint guards let them through.

Without checkpoints, the immune cells would fight everything in your body. When your immune system fights everything in your body, you have an auto-immune disease (like lupus).

Tumors often spread because they fool the body’s immune system by producing proteins that activate this safety checkpoint. The checkpoints don’t let immune cells through to fight the tumors because the checkpoints believe the tumors are natural parts of the body. This allows cancer to grow and spread.

Tumors trick checkpoints by producing a protein called PD-L1. These proteins then bind then bind to a protein on your immune cells called PD-1. When these two proteins bind together, it activates the checkpoint and prevents the immune system from doing its job.

Opdivo works by inhibiting the checkpoints in your body. Opdivo binds to PD-1, which prevents PD-1 from binding to PD-L1, which suppresses the checkpoint-beating functionality of the tumor.

Opdivo isn’t the only drug using this mechanism. Other pipeline drugs like Keytruda and Yervoy target checkpoints in your immune system.

How Effective is Opdivo?

Immuno-therapy drugs don’t work on all cancer patients. However, they’re proven to be particularly effective for lung cancer patients – especially those with the right mutation.

Lung cancer patients appear to respond particularly well to immune-oncology drugs. They have a higher success rate than patients with other types of cancer. Opdivo, for example, has a 15% success rate.

That may seem low, but researchers are praising the drug because of those 15% of patients affected by Opdivo, the results of the drug are “durable”, which means they last for a long time.

Approximately 60% of patients who had a response to Opdivo were still responding to the drug six months later. Meanwhile, other cancer therapies can lose their effectiveness quickly over time.

A 15% success rate may not seem very high, but Opdivo is nevertheless being praised as a major step forward for the lung cancer-fighting industry.

Opdivo Treatment Options

Opdivo was approved by the FDA in March 2015 as a treatment for a specific type of lung cancer. However, the official Opdivo website claims that the drug can be used to treat a variety of conditions, including:

• -Melanoma
• -Lung Cancer
• -Kidney Cancer

Opdivo Side Effects

Opdivo works by triggering your immune system to attack cancer cells. When this doesn’t go as planned, your immune system may start attacking other parts of your body. As the makers of Opdivo explain,

“OPDIVO can cause your immune system to attack normal organs and tissues in many areas of your body and can affect the way they work.”

This activity can lead to serious and life-threatening conditions. Some of the side effects of Opdivo include:

-Lung Problems (Pneumonitis): Symptoms include new or worsening couching, chest pain, and shortness of breath.

-Intestinal Problems (Colitis): This can lead to tears or holes in your intestine, and symptoms include diarrhea, more bowel movements than usual, blood in your stools, and severe stomach area pain or tenderness.

-Liver Problems (Hepatitis): Yellowing of your skin or the whites of your eyes are symptoms of hepatitis. You may also experience severe nausea or vomiting, pain on the right side of your stomach area (abdomen), drowsiness, bleeding, or more easily bruising.

-Hormone Gland Problems: Opdivo may cause problems in your thyroid, pituitary, adrenal glands, pancreas, and other hormone glands. Signs and symptoms include headaches, extreme tiredness, weight gain or weight loss, dizziness or fainting, and changes in mood or behavior.

-Kidney Problems: Opdivo can cause kidney problems like nephritis and kidney failure, symptoms of which include a lower amount of urine, blood in your urine, swelling in your ankles, and loss of appetite.

-Skin Problems: Opdivo’s skin problems include rash, itching, skin blistering, and ulcers in the mouth or other mucous membranes.

-Inflammation of the Brain (Encephalitis): Signs of this problem include tiredness, weakness, fever, headache, confusion, memory problems, sleepiness, seizures, hallucinations, and stiff neck.

-Problems in Other Organs: Opdivo may also lead to changes in eyesight, severe or persistent muscle and joint pain, and severe muscle weakness throughout the body.

The makers of Opdivo claim that these side effects may occur more frequently when using Opdivo in conjunction with YERVOY.

Talk to your doctor to see if Opdivo is the right lung cancer treatment drug for your unique situation.