Expert Point of View: Christian U. Blank, MD, PhD
Source: The Asco Post, October 2022
Christian U. Blank, MD, PhD, Professor of Internal Medicine, staff member at Netherlands Cancer Institute, Professor at the University of Regensburg in Germany, and founding member of the International Neoadjuvant Melanoma Consortium, was the invited discussant of the MD Anderson study of cemiplimab-rwlc in resectable cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma.
“This was a single-arm trial, and the data are early—we only have response data—but the pathologic complete response rate of 51% is very promising,” Dr. Blank said. The high 63% rate of pathologic responses (complete and major) was underestimated by the radiologic response, which has been seen in other trials, he said. “We still need to find a biomarker with which we could judge our neoadjuvant therapies without the invasive resection of the tumor.”
There was some suggestion that tumor mutational burden and PD-L1 expression might be slightly correlated. However, Dr. Blank acknowledged, PD-L1 is “not a good discriminator” because some patients with PD-L1–negative disease also responded. The interferon signature was not part of the evaluation but could potentially be useful if combined with tumor mutational burden and PD-L1 expression, he added.