Immuno-Oncology

Treatment with first-line avelumab yielded promising clinical benefit and durable antitumor activity in patients with advanced non–small cell lung cancer.

While treatment with nivolumab (Opdivo) significantly improved overall survival over docetaxel in patients with advanced non–small cell lung cancer in the CheckMate-057 trial, an analysis of deaths occurring within 3 months of initiation of therapy showed numerically more deaths in the nivolumab arm.

Treatment with the combination of pembrolizumab, pomalidomide, and dexamethasone demonstrated promising durable efficacy and a tolerable safety profile for patients with relapsed/refractory multiple myeloma.

Treatment with the combination of nivolumab and ibrutinib showed encouraging activity and safety in a small phase II study of patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia and Richter transformation.

Checkpoint blockade immunotherapies that have moved quickly from the development stage to clinical use in a range of solid tumors are also being explored in hematologic malignancies.

Scott J. Antonia, MD, PhD, chair of the Department of Thoracic Oncology at Moffit Cancer Center, discusses immunotherapies that are emerging in the field of lung cancer.

The FDA has granted a priority review to a supplemental biologics license application for pembrolizumab for use as a treatment for patients with refractory classical Hodgkin lymphoma or those who have relapsed after ≥3 lines of therapy,

Immunotherapy combinations have significant potential as treatment for patients with renal cell carcinoma.

The treatment landscape of renal cell carcinoma is changing at a remarkably fast pace.

The concept of using immunotherapies to treat patients with glioblastoma multiforme is gaining ground among researchers who are interested not only in evaluating checkpoint blockade agents that have proved effective in other tumor types but also in exploring novel targets.

Jonathan E. Rosenberg, medical oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, discusses the emergence of immunotherapies in the field of bladder cancer, including atezolizumab (Tecentriq), nivolumab (Opdivo), and pembrolizumab (Keytruda). Rosenberg shared this at the 2016 OncLive State of the Science Summit on Genitourinary Cancers.