VIDEO: Combination of anti-PD-1 inhibitors with new immune-modulators produces ‘exciting’ results in solid tumors

Joshua Brody, MD, director of the lymphoma immunotherapy program at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, discusses novel advances in using checkpoint inhibitors in combination with other immune-modulators to treat solid tumors.

In this video, Brody highlights results from multiple studies presented at the ASCO Annual Meeting that demonstrated that combination therapy was effective and tolerable in this patient population.

Some of the more “exciting presentations” that came out of ASCO involved combining anti–PD-1 checkpoint inhibitors with anti-CTLA–4 antibodies, Brody told HemOnc Today.

Already a standard treatment option for patients with melanoma, the combination therapy also appeared efficacious in patients with lung cancer, he said.

“We’ve seen that, maybe as expected, adding anti-CTLA–4 to anti–PD-1 therapy increases the efficacy [to where] we see response rates of 25% across a few cohorts and reasonable durability of those responses, but not surprisingly, we see increased toxicity along with that increased efficacy,” he said.

Brody also highlights presentations that demonstrated the use of an anti-OX40 antibody in combination with anti–PD-1 yielded “very promising” results in terms of safety in treating solid tumors.

The results seem to indicate that this combination is “much safer than combining anti-CTLA–4 with anti–PD-1, [but] the efficacy still remains to be determined.”

In addition, Brody mentions studies that demonstrated that the combination of anti–PD-1 with anti-CD137 produced 20% and higher response rates in a variety of patients with solid tumors.

“Whether that’s better than anti–PD-1 alone, is what we’ll have to see, but luckily the safety seems to be quite good,” he said.