Neurologic Immune-Related Adverse Events

Neurologic irAEs commonly include a spectrum of encephalitis/meningitis, neuropathy, myositis and myasthenia gravis, and affect the peripheral nervous system in two thirds of published cases. Comprehensive knowledge of neurologic irAEs, including prospective incidence, risk factors, pathophysiology, optimal treatments and long-term outcomes, is limited. Treatment guidelines are based on consensus, and not evidence. As we treat more patients with immunotherapy and concurrently observe an increase in patients experiencing neurotoxicity, the urgent need to understand how and why these neurologic irAEs occur, and how to best manage them, is clear.

Deliverable 1 – Consensus disease definitions and severity ratings of the central and peripheral nervous system irAEs for use in clinical care and clinical trials.

Deliverable 2 – A scalable Neuro irAE Patient Registry for clinical and translational research, and clinical trials.

Task Force Chairs

Kerry Reynolds, MD
Physician & Associate Professor of Medicine
Massachusetts General Hospital & Harvard Medical School
Amanda Guidon, MD
Assistant Professor of Neurology
Massachusetts General Hospital

Researchers

Leeann Burton, MD
Neurologist
Massachusetts General Hospital

Program Manager

Jon McDunn, PhD
President
Project Data Sphere

Progress

March 30, 2021. Teilo hosted the irAE webinar to share his progress and discuss future directions for the irAE field.
A paper outlining consensus disease definitions for neurological toxicities in cancer patients undergoing immune checkpoint inhibitor treatment was published in July 2021 in the Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer (JITC) by a team of physicians at 16 institutions and with support from Project Data Sphere.