Paul Baas, MD, PhD, discusses recent updates in immuno-oncology within the field of mesothelioma.

Paul Baas, MD, PhD, a professor within the Department of Thoracic Oncology at the Netherlands Cancer Institute, discusses recent updates in immuno-oncology within the field of mesothelioma.

For mesothelioma, a few interesting developments have been made in recent years, says Baas. For 50 years, chemotherapy continued to be the standard in the space. Mesothelioma is a very aggressive disease with poor survival outcomes. Recently, however, there has been an interest in examining the use of immuno-oncology drugs within the field of mesothelioma.

To this end, a few reports of this approach in the second-line setting have been reported; these reports have implied that if 1 drug is used, such as pembrolizumab(Keytruda)or nivolumab(Opdivo), they will not show a great deal of activity, says Baas. Although these findings were a bit disappointing, some data examining nivolumaband ipilimumab(Yervoy) suggest that a combination approach might yield more promising results, says Baas.

A press release issued in April 2020 from Bristol Myers Squibb announced positive results from a first-line studycomparing immune checkpoint inhibitors versus chemotherapy in patients withmesothelioma.These data will be presented at the 2020 World Lung Conference during the Presidential Symposium and might change the first-line approach for patients; this is important news for immuno-oncology, adds Baas.

Additionally, the combination of chemotherapy with durvalumab(Imfinzi) in a single-arm study showed a favorable median overall survival (OS) of 20 months; these are quite interesting findings because normally the median OS that is reported in this space is 15 months or a maximum of 16 months, concludes Baas.

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Dr. Baas on the Promise of Immuno-Oncology in Mesothelioma - OncLive