Immuno-Oncology

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.

Immunotherapy continues to be one of the fastest-evolving fields in oncology. In recent years, numerous immunotherapies have shown good efficacy, safety, and durability across many tumor types, including some advanced solid tumors that have not seen meaningful treatment developments in decades.

The observed adverse events that have been associated with immunotherapy, especially immunotherapy combinations, have to be properly assessed against their clearly improved efficacy in patients with otherwise dismal prognosis from stage IV cancers.

The FDA has granted a priority review to a biologics license application for avelumab as a treatment for patients with metastatic Merkel cell carcinoma.

The FDA has granted a priority review to a supplemental biologics license application for pembrolizumab for previously treated patients with advanced microsatellite instability-high cancer.

The European Commission has approved nivolumab for the treatment of patients with relapsed/refractory classical Hodgkin lymphoma after autologous stem cell transplant and treatment with brentuximab vedotin.

Lung cancer alone accounts for 26.5% of all cancer-related mortalities in the United States, which is more than any other malignancy. Despite increased awareness that smoking is an important risk factor for lung cancer, which has reduced the number of smokers in the U.S., nearly a quarter of a million new diagnoses are expected in 2016.

Identifying biomarkers to determine who should receive chemotherapy, targeted agents, and immunotherapy is just one of several obstacles the prostate cancer community is currently facing.

There are a wide variety of novel agents currently being investigated in the neoadjuvant setting for patients with HER2-positive breast cancer.

Oncologists continue to face several challenges when it comes to the prevention and treatment of cervical cancer, according to Michael Birrer, MD, PhD.

Treatment with nivolumab and radiotherapy with or without concurrent temozolomide was well tolerated and showed promising signs of efficacy for patients with newly-diagnosed glioblastoma multiforme.

Pembrolizumab had a 6-month progression-free survival rate of 44% and a manageable safety profile for patients with recurrent PD-L1-positive glioblastoma multiforme.

Findings from the phase II trials KEYNOTE-028 of pembrolizumab and MEDI4736 (durvalumab) point to a role for checkpoint inhibitors in the treatment of glioblastoma multiforme, based on encouraging efficacy signals and safety data with the two agents.