Combination Immunotherapy Effective for Second-Line Melanoma Treatment
Source: Inside Precion Medicine, August 2023
A multicenter Phase II clinical trial showed that combination immunotherapy drug therapy with ipilimumab (an anti-CTLA-4 drug) and nivolumab (an anti-PD-1 therapy) is an effective second-line therapy for patients with melanoma that has progressed on PD-1 inhibitors alone. It is the first randomized study showing that continuing PD-1 therapy beyond progression can be effective when combined with another appropriate drug.
To see if a combination approach is more effective than using CTLA-4 inhibitors alone as a second-line therapy, researchers in the multi-center clinical trial enrolled 91 patients who had already been treated with an anti-PD-1 immunotherapy drug and had not received an anti-CTLA-4 drug. All the patients enrolled had cancer that had not responded to the current therapy. Sixty-eight patients were randomly assigned to receive the combination of ipilimumab and nivolumab and 23 patients received just ipilimumab.
The team found the participants receiving combination therapy had a 37% improvement in progression-free survival compared to participants who received ipilimumab alone. Patients receiving the combination treatment also had higher response rates, with 28% of patients seeing their tumor shrinking compared to only 9% of those who received ipilimumab alone. The study results are published in Nature Medicine.