Biotech Strategy Blog

Commentary on Science, Innovation & New Products with a focus on Oncology, Hematology & Cancer Immunotherapy

Posts tagged ‘PD-L1’

Biotech Strategy Blog Mailbag Monday

Lindt Gold BunnyWhat questions are BSB readers sending in to us this month?

I wanted to take a moment out of AACR Previews and catch up on some recent news that is intriguing or perplexing subscribers. All questions are anonymous and in many cases, the same questions were actually sent in by multiple people, a testament to what’s top of mind in oncology lately.

Today, we cover a Q&A on a variety of topics on Kite Pharma (the Genentech collaboration and their TCR in solid tumours), a discussion about EGVRvIII in glioblastoma, and Gilead’s woes with idelalisib and an IO pipeline.

So let’s get started – subscribers can sign-in…

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Gems from the EBCC10 Poster Hall

EBCC10

EBCC-10 Cancer Conference

Amsterdam: The 2016 European Breast Cancer Conference organised by the European CanCer Organization (ECCO) is underway (Twitter: #EBCC10 – it’s the 10th official one they have organised).

We thought it would be a good opportunity to take a break from our coverage of #BMTTandem16 to look at some of the posters that are of interest at the meeting.

As regular readers know, we spend a lot of time reading posters – it’s where we pick up new trends and early data. Most go unnoticed or unpublicised in press releases.

For this post, I’ve highlighted four posters that I’m quite interested in and that merit further discussion.

They range from basic and translational research to clinical new product development. By chance, they are evenly split between immunotherapy (PD-L1 and TILs) and acquired drug resistance to different targeted therapies.

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AACR Gems from the Poster Halls in ImmunoOncology

After yesterdays post on Gems from the Poster Halls at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) in Philadelphia where we took a look at new developments in targeted therapies, several subscribers asked for a repeat, but with a focus on immuno-oncology.

AACR 2015 Checkpoint Inhibitor PostersThere are a number of elements that many people are interested in, especially given the Merck and BMS clinical data at AACR, where we clearly saw that:

  • Anti-PD–1 therapy with pembrolizumab is superior to anti-CTLA4 with ipilimumab in metastatic melanoma (expect nivolumab to show the same thing at ASCO)
  • Combined PD–1 plus CTLA4 blockade (with nivolumab plus ipilimumab) was superior to anti-CTLA4 alone, but with higher grade 3/4 toxicities, also in advanced melanoma

Sadly though, we still see that 70-80% of patients don’t respond to these therapies.

  • How can we improve on that?
  • What happens when we explore other factors, tumour types and different aspects of the immune system?
  • What can we learn about novel sequencing or combination approaches?
  • Which ones look interesting?

Endless questions can be asked – to which we still have too few answers – although there were some encouraging signs and hints of possibilities at AACR.

The 2015 AACR program was particularly challenging this year with lots of really good symposia and general sessions, making it tough to whizz round the vast poster hall spread out around the exhibits as well.  To give you an idea of scale, it was pretty typical to cover 17K to 18K steps a day, approximately 7 to 8 miles.  For many people, fitting in a quick lunch and the posters was certainly a challenging feat, depending where you were in the complex.  With a morning session ending at 12.30pm, the afternoon session starting at 1pm and 2,000 steps between the Grand and Terrace Ballrooms, you sure had to get your skates on, Beep Beep!

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Molecular Characterisation of Colorectal Cancer

Over the last decade or so, we’ve seen a lot of new targeted agents approved in a variety of different tumour types. Of the big five cancers (breast, lung, melanoma, prostate, and colorectal) one clearly stands out as missing out on exciting new developments in the last 5 years.

In fact, we haven’t really seen anything startlingly new in the colorectal cancer (CRC) space since 2004, when the FDA approved cetuximab (Erbitux) and bevacizumab (Avastin) to much fanfare a few weeks apart at the beginning of that year. Sure, there have been other EGFR and VEGF inhibitors approved since, including panitumumab (Vectibix), z-aflibercept (Zaltrap) and regorafenib (Stivarga) in various lines of therapy, but you could argue that they’re all more of the same (type of inhibitors) and incremental in their improvements, rather truly game changing or disruptive.

Why is this? Why is there a discrepancy?

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ESMO 2014 Scientific Symposia Preview

One of my favourite sessions at any cancer conference is the science symposia, although they go under many different guises and names. At the European Society of Medical Oncology (ESMO) they are known as Special Symposia and conceptually are very similar to Clinical Science Symposia at ASCO.

ESMO 2014Here at these sessions, top thought leaders in the space debate and lecture on key issues of the day. They’re usually packed with information and are well worth attending, even in a hectic schedule.

Interestingly, immuno-oncology has a dominant focus on the program for the first time since I’ve been attending ECCO/ESMO events over the last dozen years or so, demonstrating how quickly it is being assimilated into the scientific and clinical consciousness.  Years ago, I attended a session on autologous cell therapies (ACT) and there were maybe a handful of us in the room.  In Madrid, I doubt if there will be 12 empty seats in the theatre and it will probably be what Pharmaland calls SRO – standing room only.

So what can we learn from the announced sessions this year?

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New directions in immuno-oncology in biomarkers and combinations

Today I thought it would be a good idea to answer a question sent in by a premium subscriber.  He asked,

“What’s the deal with TIL and how does that relate to checkpoint inhibitors and PD-L1 expression?”

This is a good question and there were some interesting top-line debates about this at AACR recently, which are well worth discussing and highlighting.

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ASCO GI Keynote: The future of Immunotherapy is Combinations

Cancer immunotherapy was described in the December 20, 2013 issue of Science magazine as their Breakthrough of the Year, but really, we are just scratching the surface of what can be achieved.

“We are at beginning of a REVOLUTION in immunotherapy,” said Elizabeth M. Jaffee, MD at the start of American Society of Clinical Oncology GastroIntestinal (ASCO GI) symposium keynote lecture on Immunologic Treatments for GI Cancers.

Elizabeth M Jaffee MD ASCO GI Keynote

Elizabeth M Jaffee, MD

Jaffee likened the revolution in immunotherapy to the same excitement the Beatles brought to music, or the same magnitude of technology advances made by Apple.

Dr Jaffee is the Dana and Albert “Cubby” Broccoli Professor of Oncology at Johns Hopkins, and has developed a number of vaccines including GVAX, which is currently licensed to Aduro Biotech.

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What to watch for at San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium

Whew, having just finished the American Society of Hematology (ASH) meeting, we run on to the breast cancer symposium in San Antonio (SABCS), making for a very busy week of data deluge!  Our Post ASH analysis will also run concurrently for a few days.

There are also a number of interesting areas to look out for in terms of interesting breast cancer developments.

Premium subscribers can find out more about the following below:

Companies: Roche, GSK, AbbVie, AstraZeneca, Novartis, Lilly
Drugs: Herceptin, Avastin, Perjeta, Tykerb, veliparib, olaparib, BKM120, ramucirumab, PD-1, PD-L1

Here’s a quick preview of some of the landmark data emerging from this conference, some positive, some negative.

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A top line look at the PD-1 and PD-L1 abstracts at ECCO 2013

Amsterdam: Check point immunotherapy is probably on everyone’s hot topic list in oncology at the moment and rightly so.

ECCO Congress BannerOne of the key sessions I’m looking forward to at ECCO is the Saturday Lung Cancer Symposium on new therapeutic targets. It includes not only a presentation on PD-1 and PD-L1 Immune checkpoint antibodies, but also overviews of progress in several other pathways, namely PI3K-AKT-mTOR, RAS-RAF-MEK and ALK+/Hsp inhibitors. This should be an excellent session that allows a broad overview of many of the key areas of research in the disease.

Aside from a late breaker on the two-year ipilimumab data in metastatic melanoma, the check point abstracts I managed to find in the #ECC2013 program appear to be all posters.  Here are my quick notes ahead of the presentations for Premium Content subscribers:

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