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

Abstract

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 Radiology 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.