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
Muhit Özcan, MD, of Turkey’s Ankara University School of Medicine, discusses the ongoing phase III BELLWAVE-010 study of nemtabrutinib plus venetoclax vs venetoclax plus rituximab in previously treated patients with relapsed or refractory chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL)/small lymphocytic lymphoma (SLL) (Abstract TPS7089).
The ASCO Post Staff
Yucai Wang, MD, PhD, of the Mayo Clinic, discusses the increased efficacy of combination therapy with pembrolizumab plus a BCR kinase inhibitor compared with pembrolizumab alone in patients with Richter transformation of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL; Abstract 7050).
The ASCO Post Staff
Peter Riedell, MD, of The University of Chicago, discusses phase III results on the use of tucidinostat plus R-CHOP in patients with previously untreated diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) with double expression of MYC and BCL2. The regimen appeared to improve event-free survival and complete response rates vs R-CHOP in the front-line setting. As this is an interim analysis, longer-term follow-up will be needed to better understand its impact, says Dr. Riedell.
The ASCO Post Staff
Pauline Funchain, MD, of Stanford University, and Caroline Robert, MD, PhD, of Gustave Roussy, discuss phase II findings showing that combining encorafenib and binimetinib followed by ipilimumab and nivolumab vs ipilimumab and nivolumab can improve progression-free survival in patients with BRAF-V600E/K-mutated melanoma characterized by high lactate dehydrogenase and liver metastases (Abstract LBA9503).
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).
