OncoSec Medical, a company developing DNA-based intratumoral cancer immunotherapies, has entered a clinical collaboration with the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), to evaluate the safety, tolerability and efficacy of the combination of KEYTRUDA (pembrolizumab), Merck’s anti-PD-1 therapy, and OncoSec’s ImmunoPulse (intratumoral IL-12) in metastatic melanoma.
MRV Research
Researchers discover why advanced melanoma patients respond to pembrolizumab drug
Work supported by the Stand Up To Cancer (SU2C) – Cancer Research Institute (CRI) – Immunology Translational Research Dream Team, launched in 2012 to focus on how the patient’s own immune system can be harnessed to treat some cancers have pioneered an approach to predict why advanced melanoma patients respond to a new life-saving melanoma drug. This new drug, pembrolizumab (Keytruda), was recently approved by the FDA. These findings are reported in Nature online November 26, 2014, ahead of print in the journal.
Study finds potential predictive biomarker for response to PD-L1 checkpoint blocker
A promising experimental immunotherapy drug works best in patients whose immune defenses initially rally to attack the cancer but then are stymied by a molecular brake that shuts down the response, according to a new study led by researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Yale University School of Medicine
Study Finds Key Mutations in Melanoma Patients Responsive to Immunotherapy
Timothy Chan, MD, PhD, and oncology fellow Alexandra Snyder Charen, MD, at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, are working to advance the way melanoma patients are treated with immunotherapy. The two researchers, along with collaborators from outside universities and companies, proposed a reason why only some patients respond to ipilimumab and reported their results in “Genetic Basis for Clinical Response to CTLA-4 Blockade in Melanoma,” published in the New England Journal of Medicine.