Thursday 19 January 2017

Agenus vaccine (HSPPC-96) plus pembrolizumab (Keytruda) for new GBM

We've just heard that UCLA will be starting a trial combining DCVax with nivolumab.
NCT03014804   (disregard the references to a "lung tumor" vaccine.  This is a GBM trial and those references were a mistake which should be fixed soon.


Another trial will soon be opening for newly diagnosed GBM testing the Agenus Prophage vaccine (HSPPC-96) in combination with pembrolizumab.  This is a randomized phase 2 trial and unfortunately one arm will be treated with standard of care + pembrolizumab + placebo, while the other arm gets standard + pembrolizumab + vaccine.

Another trial of HSPPC-96 for newly diagnosed GBM reported some results at ASCO 2015.  Patients with high PD-L1 expression had median survival of 18 months, while patients with low PD-L1 expression had an amazing median survival of 44.7 months.  There is thus very good rationale to combine this vaccine with a PD-1 inhibitor such as pembrolizumab.

4 comments:

  1. How do you find out if you have high or low PD-L1 expressed? Is it in a Foundation One Report?

    Mike B

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    1. This test is one where you're looking for the presence or absence of a protein (PD-L1), probably by immunohistochemistry. FoundationOne is specifically gene sequencing, so its not on FoundationOne reports. Caris does PD-L1 testing. You could also try asking your oncologist at the institution where the tumor sample is stored if they could run that test.

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  2. We did ours thru foundation bur looks like they used an outside lab. IHC

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You're right it does seem that Foundation Medicine now offers PD-1 and PD-L1 testing, though this is separate from the FoundationOne test also offered by Foundation Medicine.

      http://investors.foundationmedicine.com/releasedetail.cfm?releaseid=985071

      I was unable to find information about PD-1 or PD-L1 testing in the main section of the Foundation Medicine website (the above was from the investors section).

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