Biotech Strategy Blog

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

Posts tagged ‘PD-L1 MPDL3280A’

Top 10 immunotherapy studies with checkpoint blockade at ASCO 2015

As we wrap up our AACR coverage, I can’t believe it’s already time to discuss the annual American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting already – it seems to come around way too fast.

Over the last few years, we’ve reported on the rapid and impressive rise of innate, adoptive and adaptive immunotherapies in cancer research and wondered how long it would take before we see such data presented in the plenary session.  That actually happens this year… finally!

It does look like 2015 is the year that checkpoint inhibitors cannot be ignored for plenary selection with the wealth at data available at first AACR and now ASCO emerging.

This is no bad thing, especially given these drugs can affect the long tail of survival and are really starting to impact the dismal 5-year survival rates in metastatic melanoma and non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

Beyond those two tumour types, what else can we expect to see and how is the data likely to shape up?  We took a look at the abstracts available based on the titles only, the actual abstracts themselves come out next week.

What did we find?

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The Science of PD1 PDL1 Cancer Immunotherapy

Nature Cover Checkpoint InhibitorsIn a landmark publication today, the prestigious journal Nature includes five “Letters” regarding checkpoint blockade of the programmed death-1 (PD-1) receptor and its ligand PD-L1. It confirms the promise and potential of the emerging field of immuno-oncology to provide durable and long lasting responses in many cancers.

Readers of the blog will already have read about the stunning early data presented at ASCO this year for the engineered humanized antibody MPDL3280A (Genentech/Roche) in urothelial bladder cancer (UBC). In his Nature Letter, Thomas Powles (Barts) and colleagues sum of the significance of this data in the opening sentence:

“There have been no major advances for the treatment of metastatic urothelial bladder cancer (UBC) in the last 30 years.”

On the basis of this data, MPDL3280A received Breaththrough Therapy Designation from the FDA earlier this year.

Roy Herbst (Yale) and colleagues in their Nature Letter write about biomakers of PD-L1 inhibition and how their data “suggest that MPDL3280A is most effective in patients in which pre-existing immunity is suppressed by PD-L1, and is reinvigorated on antibody treatment.”

At the recent annual meeting of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC), Dr Herbst gave one of the best presentations of the meeting, in which he discussed “Personalized Immunotherapy for Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer.”  His top ten lessons learned kept the audience’s attention throughout.

Tomorrow is the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States, so this will be the only post this week. Thanksgiving is a good time to take a moment out of the hectic life we all live to “smell the roses” and express gratitude for all the positive things around us.

Next week sees the start of the American Society of Hematology (ASH) annual meeting in San Francisco. The cancer conference circuit seems to roll quickly from one meeting to the next at the moment. There’s a lot of promising data, and while we can’t discuss the data before the meeting due to ASH embargo restrictions, next week we will be highlighting some of the presentations we are particularly looking forward to.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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ASCO GU 2014 Optimal targeting of anti PD-1 and PD-L1 therapies in renal cancer

We’ve been hearing and writing about a substantial amount of news and information on various immuno-oncology developments over the last year, especially in metastatic melanoma and lung cancer, but despite renal cell cancer (RCC) being a proven immune-sensitive disease with known PD-L1 expression, it seems to be the poor cousin to the other two tumour types given the lag in data and relative media attention.

There’s actually quite a lot going on in this disease though, from biomarker work to phase I to III trials that are either ongoing or just started accruing.

We should be hearing much more about the role of anti-PD–1 and PD-L1 antibodies in RCC over the next couple of years, including data from some large randomised controlled trials, but what’s the current state of play?

With that in mind, I was delighted to catch up with David McDermott’s (DFCI) in-depth presentation at ASCO GU in San Francisco over the weekend.  It’s always unfortunate when an interesting talk is left for the final presentation on the last day of a conference, as only a few diehards will be there to catch it!  It was a well thought out discussion though and he covered a lot of interesting ground in this space.

Agents mentioned:
ipilimumab, nivolumab, MK–3475, MPDL3280A, LAG–3, TIM–3, PD-L2, IL–2, sunitinib, everolimus, bevacizumab

Companies mentioned:
BMS, Roche/Genentech, Merck, GSK, Novartis, Pfizer

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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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