What is GTD?

Gestational Trophoblastic Disease is an extremely rare type of abnormal cells and/or tumours that begin in the womb. Most are non-cancerous (benign) but some are cancerous. They can happen during or after pregnancy. GTD is different to womb cancer.

GTD includes molar pregnancies, persistent trophoblastic disease and choriocarcinomas.

GTD is most commonly the result of a pregnancy with an abnormal combination of a sperm and egg. In other cases, a GTD is a cancerous growth that begins from a normal placenta. The placenta is the organ that develops during pregnancy and connects the fetus (unborn baby) to the uterus, also called the womb.

What is the Treatment?

Most women who develop GTD can expect to be cured with one or two relatively non-toxic single agent chemotherapeutic drugs. These do not have many side effects and have no long lasting effects on your body.

However, some women will require much more toxic multi-drug chemotherapy treatment which do have considerable side effects such as increased susceptibility to infections & hair loss, as well as longer term problems such as an earlier menopause.

We are currently trying to develop ways to avoid the use of these more toxic multi-drug chemotherapy treatments.

What is the Trial?

This trial will offer women immunotherapy treatment instead of multi-agent chemotherapy to try and cure their disease. The trial will combine Pembrolizumab, an immunotherapy drug, with one of the single chemotherapy drugs normally used to treat this cancer. It is already used to treat other cancers such as melanoma and kidney cancer.

Immunotherapy is a type of cancer treatment that helps your immune system fight cancer. It helps your immune system to recognise and fight cancer cells. It can educate the immune system to recognize and attack specific cancer cells and boost immune cells to help them eliminate cancer.

It is much less toxic than giving multi-drug chemotherapy. We expect this trial will save more women from the toxic effects of multi-drug chemotherapy.

We need your help to fund this trial to enable women to be cured of GTD without having to endure the toxic effects of multi-drug chemotherapy.