Dr. Hamid on a Retrospective Analysis of Pembrolizumab in Melanoma

Omid Hamid, MD, director of Research and Immuno-Oncology at The Angeles Clinic, discusses a retrospective analysis of pembrolizumab (Keytruda) in patients with melanoma.

A pooled retrospective analysis of patients with metastatic melanoma treated with pembrolizumab on the KEYNOTE-001, -002, and -006 trials was presented at the 2018 ESMO Congress. Hamid says that this study looked at patients who came onto the study with stable brain metastases and compared their outcomes with those who did not have metastases. These patients with brain metastases must have had definitive therapy, showing stability for 4 weeks before being eligible to enroll.

This is a follow-up to show the toxicity, tolerability, progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS) of these patients, a subset of which was looked at for the first time in this analysis. Hamid says that these findings showed that patients who came on the study with stable brain metastases did just as well as patients on the study who did not have brain metastases. The efficacy, safety, PFS, and OS were similar in both groups, although there was some increase in central nervous system toxicity in the brain metastases group.