Christian U. Blank, MD, PhD, on Melanoma: Potentially Practice-Changing Results From the NADINA Trial
2024 ASCO Annual Meeting
Christian U. Blank, MD, PhD, of the Netherlands Cancer Institute, discusses findings of an investigator-initiated phase III trial showing that neoadjuvant ipilimumab plus nivolumab followed by response-driven adjuvant treatment improved event-free survival in patients with macroscopic, resectable stage III melanoma compared with adjuvant nivolumab (LBA2)
Transcript
Disclaimer: This video transcript has not been proofread or edited and may contain errors.
NADINA is the first phase III, investigator-initiated trial, testing a combination of neoadjuvant checkpoint inhibition against standard of care adjuvant therapy. NADINA showed that neoadjuvant ipilumumab plus nivolumab is superior to adjuvant nivolumab in the event free survival, showing that 83% at one year are rent-free in case of treated neoadjuvant versus only 57 treated with the standard of care adjuvant therapy.
Special about NADINA is also that it has a personalized adjuvant part. Patients achieving a deep response, what we call major pathologic response after the neoadjuvant part, didn't receive any subsequent other therapy, no adjuvant therapy, and started the follow-up at once, and this was the case in nearly 60% of the patients. And despite of only this six weeks of treatment, these patients have an excellent outcome with an event-free survival of 95% at 12 months.
Therefore, NADINA established for the first time a neoadjuvant combination scheme for macroscopic melanoma, but it also shows that we should personalize these neoadjuvant therapies, saving toxicity and resources for patients, achieving an excellent response after the neoadjuvant therapy. In that way, it establishes a really novel concept in macroscopic melanoma.
The ASCO Post Staff
Andrea Cercek, MD, of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, discusses expanded data on the durability of complete response to dostarlimab-gxly, a PD-1 single-agent therapy administered to patients with locally advanced mismatch repair–deficient rectal cancer. The drug yielded recurrence-free responses, lasting longer than a year, without the need for chemotherapy, radiation, or surgery (LBA3512).
The ASCO Post Staff
Katherine C. Fuh, MD, PhD, of the University of California, San Francisco, discusses phase III findings of the AXLerate-OC trial, showing that batiraxcept with paclitaxel compared to paclitaxel alone improved progression-free and overall survival in patients with platinum-resistant recurrent ovarian cancer whose tumors were AXL-high in an exploratory analysis (LBA5515).
The ASCO Post Staff
Jonathan E. Rosenberg, MD, of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and Thomas Powles, MD, PhD, of Barts Cancer Institute and the University of London, discuss phase III findings from two studies: the first, investigating enfortumab vedotin-ejfv and pembrolizumab vs platinum-based chemotherapy in previously untreated patients with locally advanced or metastatic urothelial cancer; and the second, looking at nivolumab plus gemcitabine and cisplatin vs gemcitabine and cisplatin alone in patients with lymph node–only metastatic disease enrolled in the CheckMate 901 trial (Abstracts 4581 and 4565).
The ASCO Post Staff
Alex Andrea Francoeur, MD, of UC Irvine Health, discusses data showing an association between the increasing incidence of endometrial cancer and obesity, which disproportionately affects younger women and women of color. According to Dr. Francoeur, the findings warrant targeted health services and public health interventions to stabilize and ultimately reverse the rising rates (Abstract 5507).
The ASCO Post Staff
Toni K. Choueiri, MD, FASCO, of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, discusses phase III findings showing that, in patients with advanced renal cell carcinoma (RCC), the benefit of lenvatinib plus pembrolizumab vs sunitinib in overall response rate does not appear to be affected by such factors as gene‐expression signatures for tumor‐induced proliferation, PD‐L1 status, or the mutation status of RCC driver genes.
