ASCO Immunotherapy Highlights

David Carbone, MD, PhD, professor, internal medicine, College of Medicine Director, James Thoracic Center, James Cancer Hospital and Solove Research Institute at Ohio State University Medical Centerdiscusses the Checkmate 057 trial, which evaluates Opdivo (nivolumab) versus docetaxel in previously treated patients with advanced non-squamous non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

Study data reported at the 2015 ASCO Annual Meeting has demonstrated a nearly 20% response rate with the anti-programmed cell death-1 (PD-1) monoclonal antibody nivolumab (Opdivo) in patients with HCC.

An immunotherapy combination demonstrated an overall response rate of 27% in previously treated non–small cell lung cancer across a range of doses, according to results of an ongoing phase Ib study.

Patients with heavily pretreated colorectal cancer who harbored genetic defects in mismatch repair experienced high response rates when treated with the programmed cell death protein-1 inhibitor pembrolizumab (Keytruda), according to findings from an ongoing phase II study.

Patients with pretreated advanced ovarian cancer demonstrated encouraging signs of antitumor activity with monoclonal antibodies against programmed death-1 and its ligand PD-L1, according to findings from two clinical studies presented at the 2015 ASCO Annual Meeting.

Single-agent atezolizumab (formerly MPDL3280A) had excellent clinical activity in both chemotherapy-naïve and previously treated patients with metastatic non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) in the phase II FIR study,

Frontline nivolumab more than doubled progression-free survival (PFS), both as monotherapy and combined with ipilimumab compared with ipilimumab alone in patients with advanced melanoma, according to results from the phase III CheckMate-067 trial.

Nivolumab (Opdivo) improved overall survival and was less toxic compared with docetaxel in chemotherapy-pretreated patients with nonsquamous non–small cell lung cancer.

The anti-PD-1 antibody pembrolizumab produced broad and durable responses in patients with recurrent/metastatic head and neck squamous cell carcinoma.