In this exclusive ֱ video, Tanya Dorff, MD, of City of Hope in Duarte, California, discusses two prostate cancer immunotherapy studies presented at the recent American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) annual meeting.
Following is a transcript of her remarks:
There were two interesting prostate cancer immunotherapy studies at this meeting presented in the rapid oral session. One was the . It's a bispecific T-cell engager targeting DLL3 for neuroendocrine prostate cancer. Unfortunately, the response rate was relatively low and the rate of cytokine release syndrome was fairly high -- what we are used to seeing with other bispecific antibodies in this disease. So it's unlikely that this will become a therapeutic that we can use for this population that's a tremendous unmet need.
But the other antibodies that are T-cell engaging that are being used for adenocarcinoma, the prostate, things like AMG 160, which we recently published in , and the ongoing AMG 509, do seem to have higher levels of efficacy. So this is a modality that I think will come to be used in the clinic in prostate cancer treatment in the future.
The other really interesting abstract was , which was looking at using an immune selection biomarker to treat patients with mCRPC [metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer] with [ipilimumab (Yervoy)-nivolumab (Opdivo)]. So previously ipi-nivo has been difficult to tolerate in mCRPC and not as effective as we would like, but this immune selection biomarker seems to have done a good job. The response rate was considerably better, about 44%. Toxicity was more manageable in this population for whatever reason.
But, still, I think there are other selectors that people should remember. So we recently published that for high tumor mutational burden, which is on-label for pembrolizumab [Keytruda], about 50% of mCRPC patients with that biomarker respond to single agent, which has a much better toxicity profile.