AACR Annual Meeting

According to phase Ib study findings presented at the 2018 AACR Annual Meeting, combining the intratumoral toll-like receptor 9 (TLR9) agonist CMP-001 and pembrolizumab showed clinical activity in reversing PD-1 checkpoint inhibition resistance in patients with metastatic melanoma.

The 1-year progression-free survival rate was more than tripled with the combination of nivolumab and ipilimumab versus chemotherapy in treatment-naïve patients with non–small cell lung cancer with high tumor mutation burden, according to initial findings from the phase III CheckMate-227 trial.

Findings, presented at the 2018 AACR Annual Meeting, demonstrated that an off-the-shelf, dual-targeted chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell approach found positive results in preclinical specificity, functionality, and efficacy studies.

Alexander M. M. Eggermont, MD, PhD, director general of Gustave Roussy Cancer Campus Grand Paris in Villejuif, France, discusses the phase III results from the EORTC 1325-MG/KEYNOTE-054 trial presented at the 2018 AACR Annual Meeting.

According to results of a pilot study presented at the 2018 AACR Annual Meeting and simultaneously published in the <em>New England Journal of Medicine,</em>&nbsp;neoadjuvant treatment with the PD-1 inhibitor nivolumab (Opdivo) demonstrated a 45% major pathologic response rate in patients with resectable stage I to III non&ndash;small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) irrespective of PD-L1 expression.

Results from the phase III KEYNOTE-189 trial were presented at the 2018 AACR Annual Meeting, indicating that the combination of pembrolizumab with standard chemotherapy in the frontline setting reduced the risk of death by more than 50% in patients with nonsquamous non-small cell lung cancer without&nbsp;<em>EGFR&nbsp;</em>or&nbsp;<em>ALK</em>&nbsp;mutations.

In a precision medicine success story, crizotinib (Xalkori) demonstrated a 50% objective response rate and a 100% disease control rate in patients with&nbsp;<em>ALK</em>-positive advanced, inoperable inflammatory tumors, in findings from the CREATE study presented at the 2018 AACR Annual Meeting.&nbsp;

Vivek Subbiah, MD, associate medical director, Clinical Center for Targeted Therapy, assistant professor, Department of Investigational Cancer Therapeutics, Division of Cancer Medicine, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, discusses targeting <em>RET </em>alterations in solid tumors during the 2018 AACR Annual Meeting.

According to the results from a phase I study, BLU-667, a next-generation tyrosine kinase inhibitor, was well-tolerated and demonstrated clinical benefit in patients with advanced,&nbsp;<em>RET</em>-altered solid tumors who had progressed on previous therapies. These findings were presented April 14 to 18 at the ASCR Annual Meeting 2018 in Chicago, Illinois.

According to phase III results from the EORTC 1325-MG/KEYNOTE-054 trial presented at the 2018 AACR Annual Meeting and published in the <em>New England Journal of Medicine, </em>adjuvant pembrolizumab (Keytruda) reduced the risk of recurrence or death by 43% in&nbsp;patients with resected, high-risk stage III melanoma.

Treatment with the PARP inhibitor olaparib demonstrated a durable ORR of 87.5% in a biomarker-defined subgroup of men with pretreated sporadic mCRPC in a phase II multi-step adaptive trial.

Mark R. Middleton, MD, PhD, discusses the results of a phase I/IIa trial of IMCgp100, a bispecific immunotherapy, for the treatment of patients with melanoma.

The PD-L1 inhibitor MPDL3280A demonstrated a 19% objective response rate (ORR) with 75% of responses ongoing in pretreated patients with metastatic triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC).

A prospective study of retrospectively analyzed blood samples of patients with nonresectable pancreatic cancer found that plasma KRAS mutational burden correlates with overall survival (OS).

Mark Erlander, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer, Trovagene, discusses a study looking at the association between ctDNA KRAS mutation levels and outcomes in patients with non-resectable pancreatic cancer.

Pembrolizumab (Keytruda) achieved an overall response rate (ORR) of 45.2% among a cohort of patients with high PD-L1-expressing non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) in the phase I KEYNOTE-001 trial.

Pembrolizumab (Keytruda) yielded significantly better outcomes compared with ipilimumab (Yervoy) in a randomized phase III trial of patients with advanced melanoma.

IMCgp100, an anti-CD3 antibody fragment fused to a gp100-specific T cell receptor, yielded long-lasting responses in patients with advanced melanoma.