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Standard treatment options for patients with advanced gastric cancer (GC) offer limited efficacy and are associated with some toxicity, which necessitates the development of more effective therapies for improving the treatment outcomes for this disease. Immunotherapy involving immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) which inhibit the programmed death 1 (PD-1)/programmed death ligand 1 interaction has emerged as a new treatment option. Nivolumab, a human IgG4 monoclonal antibody inhibitor of PD-1, has demonstrated promising clinical activity and induced durable responses in patients with advanced GC. Nivolumab has recently been approved for treating patients with pretreated advanced GC in Japan. In the present review, we summarized current evidence of the clinical efficacy of ICIs in a variety of solid tumors and reported our experience in patients with GC who were treated with nivolumab and the interesting features that were observed in these cases. Certain ICI-specific clinical features such as pseudo- and hyper-progression of tumor and hyper-response to subsequent chemotherapy have been reported in several cancer types. Lastly, we discussed the present scenario regarding research on biomarkers for assessing the clinical benefits of ICI therapies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A 62-year-old Japanese female with primary lung adenocarcinoma received seven cycles of nivolumab as an eighth line of chemotherapy until she presented with hemoptysis. After transcatheter arterial embolization therapy, she received subsequent chemotherapy with paclitaxel and S−1. Four weeks later, a chest computed tomography examination revealed infiltrative shadows mainly in the right lung field, in addition to enlargement of the lung metastasis in the right middle lung lobe. Bronchofiberscopic examination revealed infiltration of lymphocytes without any malignant cells in the right segment 1 of the lung, which suggested interstitial lung disease. Corticosteroid therapy not only improved the infiltrative shadows but also reduced the lung metastasis. Even after the infiltrative shadows improved, the lung metastasis reduced further. This phenomenon resembles manifestation of pseudoprogression during treatments with immune checkpoint inhibitors, such as nivolumab. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]