Immuno-oncology in the perioperative setting: the next frontier in resectable head and neck cancers – a systematic review
Akhil Kapoor, Anuj Gupta, Bipinesh Sansar, Bal Krishna Mishra, Nandini Menon, Minit Shah, Vanita Noronha, Kumar Prabhash · 2026
Read Immuno-oncology in the perioperative setting: the next frontier in resectable head and neck cancers – a systematic review by Akhil Kapoor, Anuj Gupta, Bipinesh Sansar, Bal Krishna Mishra, Nandini Menon, Minit Shah, Vanita Noronha, Kumar Prabhash (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/PMC13560393.txt.
Description
Akhil Kapoor and colleagues systematically review perioperative immunotherapy for resectable head and neck squamous cell carcinoma, where nearly half of patients relapse within five years despite aggressive standard treatment. Their 2026 PRISMA-compliant review searches four databases and conference proceedings from 2018 onward. Twenty-five studies qualified, and heterogeneity ruled out a pooled meta-analysis.
Checkpoint inhibitors before surgery proved safe and did not delay operations, but single-drug treatment produced major pathological responses in only about six percent of patients. Doubling up helped: one trial doubled that response rate by adding a second checkpoint drug. After surgery, adding nivolumab to chemoradiotherapy lifted three-year disease-free survival in a major trial. A perioperative pembrolizumab trial improved event-free survival enough to win regulatory approval for certain tumors. The authors describe a fast-moving frontier still refining biomarkers and drug sequencing.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Akhil Kapoor, Anuj Gupta, Bipinesh Sansar, Bal Krishna Mishra, Nandini Menon, Minit Shah, Vanita Noronha, Kumar Prabhash |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 54696 |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |