With the news hot off the press at the 2015 annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) that Merck’s pembrolizumab (Keytruda) beat out BMS’s ipilimumab (Yervoy) in advanced melanoma, quite a few readers wrote in asking whether this signals the end for ipilimumab?
The short answer is no, and here’s why…
Philadelphia – at the 2015 annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), new data was presented that showed checkpoint inhibitors have a greater effect when they work in combination, they may also offer a new effective treatment option in Triple Negative Breast Cancer (TNBC).
At AACR 2015, F. Stephen Hodi MD (Dana-Farber Cancer Institute) presented results, published simultaneously in the New England Journal of Medicine, that showed in advanced melanoma, combining two checkpoint inhibitors (nivolumab and ipilimumab) showed better results than with one alone (ipilumumab). The authors in their NEJM paper conclude:
The objective-response rate and the progression-free survival among patients with advanced melanoma who had not previously received treatment were significantly greater with nivolumab combined with ipilimumab than with ipilimumab monotherapy. Combination therapy had an acceptable safety profile.
Yesterday at AACR, Leisha S. Emens MD, PhD (Johns Hopkins) presented the results in TNBC from a phase 1 trial of MPDL3280A (Roche/Genentech), a checkpoint inhibitor that targets the PD-L1/PD-1 signaling pathway.
Dr Emens (right) is shown in the picture below presenting at an AACR media briefing moderated by Louis M. Weiner MD, Dr Hodi is pictured left.
The only currently available treatment for TNBC is chemotherapy, but sadly patients often do not live long, and rapidly progress. Progression-free survival (PFS) is estimated to be around 4 months in TNBC. This means there is a real unmet medical need for effective new treatments. The fact that cancer immunotherapy, and in particularly checkpoint inhibitors targeting the PD-L1/PD-1 signaling pathway may have potential in this disease is huge.
Cancer immunotherapy and in particular checkpoint inhibitors are a hot topic at AACR. In this post we look in more detail at the data presented.
Philadelphia – the 2015 annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) is in full swing, with over 18,000 attendees, it’s probably the world’s largest meeting dedicated to cancer research. The theme is “Bringing Cancer Discoveries to Patients.”
I challenge anyone not to attend, and come away inspired with new ideas on how the field of cancer research will evolve in coming years.
At this year’s annual meeting, not surprisingly, cancer immunotherapy is one of the hot topics. Yesterday there was the simultaneous publication of two papers in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) to coincide with data presented at the meeting.
The conclusion of the paper by Edward B. Garon, MD (UCLA) et al was that:
Pembrolizumab had an acceptable side-effect profile and showed antitumor activity in patients with advanced non–small-cell lung cancer. PD-L1 expression in at least 50% of tumor cells correlated with improved efficacy of pembrolizumab.
The other paper published in the NEJM was for:
The conclusion of the paper by Caroline Robert, MD PhD, presented at AACR by Antoni Ribas, M.D., Ph.D.(UCLA) was:
The anti–PD-1 antibody pembrolizumab prolonged progression-free survival and overall survival and had less high-grade toxicity than did ipilimumab in patients with advanced melanoma.
Dr Ribas (left) and Dr Garon (right) are pictured at an AACR media briefing chaired by Dr Suzanne Topalian (Johns Hopkins).
This year’s AACR annual meeting is to paraphrase Bertrand Tombal, “a Grand Cru year”. Not only in cancer immunotherapy, but in metabolism, epigenetics and advances in drug discovery.
We’re excited about the prospect of another three days at the meeting, but in the meantime in this post there’s some top-line thoughts for subscribers on some of the data that caught our attention over the weekend.