James Allison on the Future of Checkpoint Inhibitors in Melanoma

Source: OncLive, December 2015

Immune checkpoint blockade has become a pillar of cancer treatment, says immunotherapy pioneer James Allison, PhD.

“It has become clear, in the past few years, that immune checkpoint blockade has really taken its place along with radiation, surgery, and chemotherapy,” says Allison, chair of Immunology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. “However, it differs from the other pillars somewhat, in that it can really be curative in certain cancers.”

Melanoma is one such cancer where checkpoint inhibitors have proven to be extremely beneficial.

The FDA recently expanded its approval for the PD-1 immune checkpoint inhibitor nivolumab (Opdivo) to include it as frontline treatment of patients with BRAF wild-type advanced melanoma. The expanded approval was based on the CheckMate-066 trial, which found that the median overall survival was not yet reached with nivolumab compared to 10.8 months for dacarbazine (HR, 0.42; 95% CI, 0.30-0.60; P <.0001). Median progression-free survival (PFS) with nivolumab was 5.1 versus 2.2 months for dacarbazine (HR, 0.43; 95% CI, 0.34-0.56; P <.0001).