Immuno-Oncology

Anne Chiang, MD, PhD, professor and thoracic oncologist at Yale Cancer Center, discusses molecular testing in lung cancer and how it affects treatment decisions.

Joaquim Bellmunt, MD, PhD, attending physician of Solid Tumor Oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, discusses findings from the phase III KEYNOTE-045 study, which compared second- or third-line pembrolizumab with investigator-choice chemotherapy as a treatment for patients with metastatic or locally advanced, unresectable urothelial carcinoma.

Everett Vokes, MD, John E. Ultmann Professor of Medicine and Radiation Oncology, physician-in-chief, University of Chicago Medical Center, chair, Department of Medicine, University of Chicago Medicine, discusses the FDA approvals of the PD-L1 inhibitors nivolumab (Opdivo) and pembrolizumab (Keytruda) for the treatment of patients with head and neck cancer.

Nivolumab (Opdivo) may be the only checkpoint inhibitor that is approved by the FDA as a treatment of patients with Hodgkin lymphoma, but other immunotherapies—alone and in combination with other novel agents—are emerging in other indications.

Patrick M. Forde, MBBCh, assistant professor of oncology, Johns Hopkins Hospital, discusses the CheckMate-026 study, which demonstrated that first-line therapy with nivolumab failed to improve progression-free survival (PFS) in PD-L1–positive non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) compared with standard chemotherapy.

The FDA has approved nivolumab for patients with metastatic or recurrent squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck following progression on platinum-based therapy.

Treatment with nivolumab significantly extended overall survival compared with placebo for patients with unresectable, advanced, or recurrent gastric cancer who were refractory or intolerant to standard therapy.

Robert Ferris, MD, PhD, vice chair for Clinical Operations, associate director for Translational Research, and coleader of the Cancer Immunology Program at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, discusses the impact of the FDA approval of nivolumab (Opdivo) for the treatment of patients with recurrent or metastatic head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (SCCN).

Using combination regimens in an effective manner will likely be a go-to method with immunotherapy in multiple myeloma, in an effort to induce durable responses in patients.

Maurie Markman, MD, president, Medicine and Science, Cancer Treatment Centers of America, editor-in-chief, OncologyLive, discusses the current status of immune targeting as potential treatment for patients with ovarian cancer.

Results from a safety, tolerability, and dose escalation phase Ib/II study involving intratumoral SD-101 and pembrolizumab (Keytruda) have demonstrated that the combination was well-tolerated with no dose-limiting toxicities.

The combination of atezolizumab and cobimetinib may lead to a higher overall response and a longer progression-free survival than either agent alone in patients with metastatic melanoma.

Christian Blank, MD, PhD, Netherlands Cancer Institute, discusses some of the early findings from the OpACIN trial testing a combination of ipilimumab and nivolumab in the neoadjuvant and adjuvant setting for patients with stage III melanoma.

Neoadjuvant therapy with the combination of nivolumab and ipilimumab is plausible and effective but can induce a high level of adverse events calling for further research into better tolerated dosing schemes.

Ryan Sullivan, MD, Massachusetts General Hospital, discusses how best to treat patients with melanoma who have the BRAF mutation.

The addition of the PD-L1 inhibitor atezolizumab to the MEK inhibitor cobimetinib and the BRAF inhibitor vemurafenib induced a high response rate for patients with BRAF-mutant unresectable melanoma.

With immunotherapy agents showing significant promise in bladder cancer, the potential for these agents in the neoadjuvant setting is wide open.

Following a long drought in the development of bladder cancer treatments, the field is now poised to benefit from a series of rapid advances ushered in by highly effective immunotherapies.

A window of opportunity exists in which some patients with non–muscle-invasive bladder cancer could benefit from trying novel second-line therapies prior to surgery.