Dr. Baas on the Promise of Immuno-Oncology in 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 nivolumab and 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 study comparing immune checkpoint inhibitors versus chemotherapy in patients with mesothelioma. 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.