Immune Anticancer Agents Can Increase the Risk of Diabetes

Immune anticancer agents are drugs that prevent cancer cells from evading the body’s immune system or enable immune cells to better recognize and attack the cancer cells. They are the most attention-grabbing anticancer therapeutic agents in recent years.

Immunotherapy, also known as biologic therapy, refers to using the body’s immune system to fight cancer. Cancer cells can live unchecked in the body because the immune system does not recognize them as an invader. Immunotherapy helps the immune system “see” cancer and attack it.

Immunotherapy has Little Impact on Normal Cells

The first immunotherapy drug to treat cancer was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2011. Since then, immunotherapy has developed rapidly and become one of the important means of cancer treatment.[1]

Unlike the commonly used cancer treatment methods—chemotherapy, radiation therapy, targeted therapy, and others—that attack not only cancer cells but may damage normal tissues, immunotherapy can activate or strengthen the ability of the body’s own immune system to recognize and attack only cancer cells. It has relatively little impact on normal cells, and the side effects are relatively mild. 

Risk of Diabetes

However, immunotherapy can trigger the immune system to become overactive and lead to various side effects.

A study in South Korea showed that applying immune anticancer agents “increases the risk of new diabetes by 2.45 times compared to cytotoxic anticancer drugs.” [2]

The study was conducted by the research team of the Severance Hospital of Yonsei University and published in the Korea Daily publication on Nov. 18. 

The research team compared the risk of developing diabetes among 221 patients treated with immunotherapy anticancer agents and 1,105 patients treated with conventional cytotoxic anticancer drugs, at Severance Hospital between 2005 and 2020.

The team found that 10.4 percent of patients in the immune anticancer agent group had an increasing glucose pattern over time after using the drug, which was also higher than the 7.4 percent in the conventional chemotherapy anticancer agent group.

The research team also analyzed the clinical conditions and characteristics of the group with elevated blood sugar among users of immune anticancer agents and found that patients with elevated blood sugar had an average blood sugar exceeding 126 mg/dL, three months before the use of immune anticancer agents. 

In addition, 87 percent of patients whose blood sugar increased after receiving the immune anticancer drugs were men who also had an increased incidence of lymphocytosis.

Professor Minyoung Lee, who participated in the study, said, “Based on the risk of diabetes induced by immune anticancer agents and the clinical characteristics of patients confirmed in this study, high-risk groups can be predicted and screened, and treatment plans can be formulated.” She said, “They will contribute to prolonging the lives of many cancer patients through the safer use of immune anticancer agents via effective new cancer therapeutics.”

The research results were published in the international academic journal Metabolism—Clinical and Experimental on September 16, 2022. [3]