Anti-PD-1 Therapy in Metastatic Melanoma

Source: OncLive, February 2019

Transcript:

Axel Hauschild, MD: When we discuss stage IV melanoma now, I think it’s good to provide a quick overview on ASCO [American Society of Clinical Oncology] 2018. Most of the trials that have been released as an update at ASCO with long-term survival data were done on PD-1 [programmed cell death protein 1] antibodies. Can you summarize KEYNOTE-001 and KEYNOTE-006, Caroline, and the latest findings from ASCO in terms of long-term survival? For the first time, we have seen 5-year survival data not only on nivolumab, which was presented 2 years before with a 34% 5-year survival and was exciting. Now we have the data on pembrolizumab from KEYNOTE-001 and KEYNOTE-006.

Caroline Robert, MD, PhD: KEYNOTE-001 is a huge phase I trial with 655 patients. It’s quite a heterogeneous population because we had patients who were pretreated and about 100 patients were naive. The results are a little bit better for the naive patients, but, still, we have this…

I’m not totally 100% sure that we have the plateau that we have with ipilimumab, honestly. I think we still all hope to see this very flat plateau, even though we should begin to see it with anti–PD-1 single-agent therapy. If it’s like ipilimumab, and it begins at 3 years, we should have some flattening of the curve.