Combination therapy with SD-101, pembrolizumab shows promise for metastatic melanoma

Source: Healio, June 2018

Intralesional agent SD-101 plus pembrolizumab induced a high response rate with a tolerable safety profile among a small cohort of patients with metastatic melanoma, according to results of a phase 1b/phase 2 trial presented at ASCO Annual Meeting.
Antoni Ribas, MD, PhD, professor of medicine, surgery, and molecular and medical pharmacology at University of California Los Angeles, and director of the tumor immunology program at Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, and colleagues, assessed whether SD-101 (Dynavax) — a CpG-ODN agonist of TLR9 — could enhance response to pembrolizumab (Keytruda, Merck) among patients with stage IIIc or stage IV melanoma.
“Patients with metastatic melanoma who respond to anti-PD-1 therapy like pembrolizumab have a pre-existing immune response to cancer that is blocked by PD-1 interacting with PD-L1,” Ribas told HemOnc Today. “In patients where this is not the case, then giving anti-PD-1 therapies will not work.”