This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.
VIDEO: Combination Therapies May Improve Response to Checkpoint Inhibitors
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
CHICAGO — Mary L. “Nora” Disis, MD, medical oncologist at Seattle Cancer Care Alliance and professor of medicine at University of Washington, spoke with HemOnc Today at the ASCO Annual Meeting about treatment strategies for patients who are not effectively responding to checkpoint inhibitor therapy.
“It’s really incredibly interesting to see all of the biomarkers that are now being discovered to try to identify those patients who are going to respond or not respond to immunotherapy,” Disis said.
Disis and colleagues develop cancer vaccines that specifically stimulate type I T cells, which have the ability to be released by checkpoint inhibitors.
In this video, she also discusses use of the vaccine-targeting protein IGFBP2, as well as avelumab (MSB0010718C; Merck, Pfizer) — an anti–PD-L1 checkpoint inhibitor — in patients with ovarian cancer.
“We think a strategy of taking some of these immunogenic tumors that show some response to checkpoint inhibitors and teaming them up with combination therapies may be able to push more patients over into that category [of those] who are really seeing durable responses with this type of immune therapy,” Disis said.