I am at ASCO and have a ton of meetings with various companies today and over the next couple of days. I thought I would provide a couple of quick updates, but first a heads up.
Tomorrow morning data will be presented on a study combining ipilimumab (Yervoy) with the BMS anti-PD1 drug, nivolimab. I am hearing very positive things about this study, and the data may be the most important information for melanoma to come out of this meeting. Please pay attention over the next day or two; I think the news on this will be positive.
I am at ASCO and have a ton of meetings with various companies today and over the next couple of days. I thought I would provide a couple of quick updates, but first a heads up.
Tomorrow morning data will be presented on a study combining ipilimumab (Yervoy) with the BMS anti-PD1 drug, nivolimab. I am hearing very positive things about this study, and the data may be the most important information for melanoma to come out of this meeting. Please pay attention over the next day or two; I think the news on this will be positive.
I met today with a company called Vical that has a drug called Allovectin. This is a plasmid with an antigen that is injected into a melanoma lesion. It serves to activate T-cells in the tumor area, which then get "trained" to attack tumor cells. They have a Phase III study compariing Allovectin with traditional chemotherapy. The trial closed three years ago and the data is not yet mature. Let me explain what this means. In this kind of trial, the data is blinded until a certain number of "events" happen. "Event" is a euphemism, in this case, for a patient who dies. We know that patients on chemo survive about a year. The fact that the data in this study has not yet matured means that a lot of patients are still alive after three years. It is unlikely that many patients on the chemo are survived this long, which suggests that a fairly large number of patients treated with Allovectin are still alive after three years. The company expects to have the data available by the end of September, so we will watch this closely.
I met also with a small biotech company with a drug that inhibits MET and VEGR. Studies in melanoma are unclear, but it seems to be very effective in ocular (uveal) melanoma.
In a meeting with Prometheus we discussed current and future use of Interleukin 2. IL2 curesabout 5% of patients with advanced melanoma, and has an overall response rate of about 15%. A major challenge has been finding which patients are likely to respond. They pointed to a small study showing very high response rates in patients whose tumor expresses a compound called PDL1. Maybe some progress is being made in determining who is likely to respond.
I suppose the biggest news doesn't really relate to data, but more to the field in general. This morning a poster session for melanoma. This session has people with large posters (about 3 feet by 5 feet) stuck on bulletin boards and reporting news in different cancer fields. In the past the melanoma poster session has been small and poorly attended. Today they had at least five full rows of presentation–literally dozens–and the aisles were packed with doctors looking over the progress. This, to me, shows how rapidly the field is moving foward.
I will try to report more tomorrow.
Tim–MRF
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