Michel Sadelain, MD, PhD, on the Road to Synthetic Immunity: Novel CAR Designs
AACR Annual Meeting 2021
Michel Sadelain, MD, PhD, of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, discusses the challenges in developing CAR T-cell therapy, as well as the progress being made, such as creating hybrid CAR and T-cell receptors that should enable T cells to recognize much lower levels of antigens. The field, he says, is poised to take on a range of solid tumors to extend the successes in hematologic malignancies.
The ASCO Post Staff
Jeanne Tie, MD, MBChB, of the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, discusses how to improve the current, somewhat imprecise, approach based on pathologic staging alone, used to select patients for adjuvant treatment. Circulating tumor DNA analysis after curative-intent treatment may detect minimal residual disease and might be used to predict recurrence and adjuvant treatment efficacy across multiple tumor types.
The ASCO Post Staff
Katelyn T. Byrne, PhD, of the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, discusses the first in-depth analysis of the impact of selicrelumab, an anti-CD40 antibody, which was found to enrich T cells in pancreatic tumors, activate the immune system, and alter the tumor stroma (Abstract CT005).
The ASCO Post Staff
Georgina V. Long, MD, PhD, of the Melanoma Institute Australia, University of Sydney, discusses results of the CheckMate 915 trial, which may reinforce nivolumab as an adjuvant standard of care in patients with stage IIIB–D/IV melanoma, with or without complete lymphadenectomy (Abstract CT004).
The ASCO Post Staff
Patrick M. Forde, MD, of the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins University, discusses results from the CheckMate 816 trial, which showed that adding nivolumab to chemotherapy as a neoadjuvant treatment for patients with resectable non–small cell lung cancer improved the pathologic complete response rate to 24%, compared to 2.2% with chemotherapy alone (Abstract CT003).
The ASCO Post Staff
Ralph R. Weichselbaum, MD, of the University of Chicago, discusses oligometastasis as a part of the metastatic spectrum where ablative therapies, such as surgery or stereotactic body radiotherapy, may be curative alone or with systemic agents, as well as some potential biomarkers to guide treatment selection.
