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
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
Thierry Facon, MD, of the University of Lille and Lille University Hospital, discusses phase III findings showing for the first time that isatuximab, an anti-CD38 monoclonal antibody, when given with the standard of care (bortezomib, lenalidomide, dexamethasone, or VRd) to patients with newly diagnosed multiple myeloma who are transplant-ineligible, may reduce the risk of disease progression or death by 40.4% vs VRd alone (Abstract 7500).
The ASCO Post Staff
Sherene Loi, MD, PhD, of Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, discusses a circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) analysis from a cohort of patients with early-stage breast cancer who were enrolled in the monarchE trial. This large cohort was studied to look at the usefulness of a personalized tumor-informed assay for ctDNA detection in early stage high-risk patients (LBA507).
The ASCO Post Staff
Joshua D. Brody, MD, of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, discusses results from the EPCORE NHL-2 study, which was designed to evaluate the safety and efficacy of epcoritamab-bysp plus rituximab and lenalidomide in the first-line setting for patients with follicular lymphoma and to assess epcoritamab as maintenance therapy in this population (Abstract 7014).
The ASCO Post Staff
Reshma Jagsi, MD, DPhil, of Emory University Winship Cancer Institute, and Christian F. Singer, MD, MPH, of the Medical University of Vienna, discuss the MUC-1 vaccine tecemotide. When added to standard neoadjuvant systemic therapy for patients with early-stage breast cancer, this vaccine improved distant relapse–free and overall survival rates. Despite the exploratory nature of this observation, says Dr. Singer, this is the first long-term survival benefit of an anticancer vaccine in breast disease reported to date (Abstract 587).
