Dr. Gainor on Neoadjuvant Checkpoint Blockade in NSCLC

Justin F. Gainor, MD, director of Targeted Immunotherapy, Massachusetts General Hospital, and assistant professor of medicine, Harvard Medical School, discusses neoadjuvant checkpoint blockade in non—small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

At the 2019 ASCO Annual Meeting, several studies were presented on the use of neoadjuvant checkpoint blockade. The first was the Lung Cancer Mutation Consortium (LCMC) study, which looked at neoadjuvant and adjuvant atezolizumab (Tecentriq). Notably, a subset of patients had disease progression prior to surgery; several others experienced disease progression or unresectable disease at the time of surgery. However, the majority of patients were able to undergo surgical resection; those patients tended to have stage I/II disease, says Gainor.

Additionally, a study conducted by investigators at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center evaluated the use of single-agent nivolumab (Opdivo) versus the combination of nivolumab and ipilimumab (Yervoy) as induction therapy. Data showed that the combination of nivolumab and ipilimumab resulted in a slightly higher major pathologic response rate than was seen in the LCMC trial.