A course of treatment with checkpoint inhibitors Yervoy (ipilimumab) and Opdivo (nivolumab) for patients with unresectable or metastatic melanoma is every 3 weeks for a total of four doses. Almost forty percent of patients receiving this combined regimen discontinue treatment because of immune-related adverse events. Continue reading
Tag Archives: checkpoint inhibitor
Priming cancer for immunotherapy
Augmenting the responses to checkpoint inhibitors, which remove the “breaks” from the immune response, is a very popular area of research. The general concept is to turn immunologically cold tumors hot. For example, triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) is considered an immunologically cold tumor – anti-PD(L)1 therapy has shown responses of just 5-10%. Continue reading
Recent immune checkpoint study failures do not dampen enthusiasm for the future
Immune checkpoint inhibitors are simply cancer wonder drugs about which we are learning more each day. Because they don’t work optimally in many patients and some even hyper-progress, the goal is to determine ways to expand their effectiveness to more patients. As such, the number of clinical studies with checkpoints and checkpoint combinations continues to grow.
Immune checkpoint inhibitors act by blocking the abrogating phase of the immune response that is necessary to prevent autoimmune disease – by prolonging the immune response against cancer, a more robust and prolonged immune response, which is required for effective cancer therapy, is achieved with checkpoint therapy. Continue reading
PD-L1 Inhibitor, avelumab, approved for Merkel cell carcinoma
Avelumab (Bavencio) is a PD-L1 inhibitor that was approved for the treatment of patients with metastatic Merkel cell carcinoma (MCC). Continue reading
Roche Signs $310MM Early Stage Deal with for mRNA Vaccines
Roche will be collaborating with BioNTech to develop personalized vaccines based on BioNTech’s mRNA products combined with Roche’s PD-L1 checkpoint inhibitor, Tecentriq (atezolizumab), which was approved for bladder cancer in May 2016. Continue reading