Dr. Dumoulin on NVALT 12 Data in NSCLC

Daphne Dumoulin, MD, pulmonologist, Erasmus MC Cancer Institute, Netherlands, discusses the NVALT 12 study, a trial examining paclitaxel/carboplatin/bevacizumab inducing peripheral effector CD8 T-cell proliferation that could be prone to treatment in checkpoint inhibitors in patients with non—small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

After treating patients with 6 weeks of paclitaxel/carboplatin/bevacizumab, there was an increase in the number of proliferating CD8 T cells compared with baseline. Meanwhile, CD4 T cells remained stable. Proliferating CD8 T cells express PD-1 more frequently and express more PD-1 per cell compared with non-proliferating CD8 T cells, according to Dumoulin. However, patients with more than a two-fold increase in proliferation of T cells did not show a better outcome.

The study shows paclitaxel/carboplatin/bevacizumab induces proliferation of CD8 T cells and expresses more co-inhibitory checkpoint molecules. The next step, according to Dumoulin, is to investigate if these proliferating CD8+ T cells are predictive of a response to checkpoint inhibition therapy as sequential or concurrent therapy.