VIDEO: Breast cancer with high tumor mutation burden may benefit from checkpoint inhibitors
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Sara Tolaney, MD, MPH, spoke with Healio about results from the NIMBUS trial presented at San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium 2021.
The trial assessed nivolumab plus ipilimumab among patients with metastatic breast cancer and high tumor mutation burden. According to Tolaney, assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a breast medical oncologist with Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, five of the 30 patients enrolled responded to treatment, three of whom had hormone receptor-positive breast cancer.
“What’s really interesting about the study is that all the patients who achieved response had very durable responses,” she said, adding that the survival outcome at 12 months was 100% among patients who achieved response.
She explained that in a pre-planned exploratory analysis assessing response rate by tumor mutation burden, the researchers determined that there was a response rate of approximately 60% among those with a tumor mutation burden of 14 mutations per megabase or greater.
“My takeaway from this study is that checkpoint inhibition does have activity in patients who have high tumor mutation burden,” Tolaney said.
She noted that immunotherapy is currently mostly used among those with triple-negative breast cancer and not in hormone receptor-positive patients because “we haven’t seen much efficacy to date” in these patients.
“But here, you’re seeing even in hormone receptor-positive patients, those who have high [tumor mutation burden] do do well with checkpoint inhibition.”
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