Hot Topics With Immunotherapy in Lung Cancer

Karen Reckamp, MD, co-director of the Thoracic Oncology Program at the City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center, discusses combinations with immunotherapy in lung cancer at the International Lung Cancer Congress. She says this is a very hot topic in the field right now.

The first combination she brought up in her talk was ipilimumab (Yervoy) plus nivolumab (Opdivo). According to data presented earlier this year at the annual AACR meeting, this combination showed significant progression-free survival benefit over chemotherapy in a subset of patients with high tumor mutational burden (TMB).

Another hot topic in the field included the combination of MET inhibitors with immunotherapy. After seeing positive results for this combination in renal cell carcinoma, a number of ongoing trials are now looking at this combination in lung cancer, including the combination of ipilimumab, nivolumab, and the MET inhibitor cabozantinib (Cabometyx).

Another area that has been looked at is the combination of immunotherapy plus targeted therapies, such as osimertinib (Tagrisso). This agent has been established as a well-tolerated and efficacious drug, but the results in combination with an immunotherapy were not as fantastic as hoped, Reckamp says.

Crizotinib (Xalkori) is another agent that works well forMET,ALK, andROS1