Latest from Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer

The goals of this cross-functional session were to define some of the most important questions in immune-oncology, and to identify how the emerging new fields of ‘immuno-physics’ and ‘immuno-mathematics’ can drive progress in understanding tumor immunology and immunotherapy. Read the SITC Hot Topic meeting report to learn how methods from mathematics and physics can be harnessed to increase understanding of the immune system, and response patterns to immune-based therapies.

The combination of cabiralizumab and nivolumab resulted in intriguing objective response rates in heavily pretreated patients with metastatic pancreatic cancer.

Neoadjuvant nivolumab plus ipilimumab demonstrated almost a tripling in objective response rate compared with the PD-1 inhibitor alone but at the cost of significant added grade 3 adverse events for patients with high-risk resectable melanoma.

The combination of the CD122-biased cytokine NKTR-214 and the PD-1 inhibitor nivolumab demonstrated target lesion reductions of 72% for patients with advanced cancers.
 

The combination of nivolumab and BMS-986205 generated promising response rates without increasing adverse effects in patients with advanced cervical or bladder cancers.

Jason J. Luke, MD, assistant professor of medicine, University of Chicago Medicine, discusses a study evaluating the IDO1 inhibitor BMS-986205 as a monotherapy and in combination with nivolumab in patients with advanced cancers.

Nivolumab demonstrated a 24% overall response rate among patients with a range of non-colorectal cancers with mismatch repair deficiency who were identified through the NCI-MATCH trial.

The high rates of cerebral edema seen with JCAR015 in the phase II ROCKET trial were attributed to early and rapid chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-modified T-cell expansion and a rise in interleukin-15 levels, a finding that could help inform future CAR T-cell usage.

A variety of adoptive T-cell therapy strategies have shown promise in clinical studies with recent FDA approvals granted to CAR-modified T-cell therapies, representing the potential for future combination strategies.