Drs. Leora Horn, Ben Solomon, & Jack West review early promising data on the potential activity of immune checkpoint inhibitors in the treatment of malignant pleural mesothelioma.

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Dr. West:  Turning to the issues of what’s emerging in mesothelioma, it seems that there’s a lot of interest in immunotherapies in this setting. Any sense of early data in that, how hopeful you are?

Dr. Solomon:  So, it was with pembrolizumab, and again, a small study, and a response rate of about 29%, and I think that’s encouraging, and I think this is in patients who had prior platinum pemetrexed, and this is a setting where there isn’t a standard second-line treatment, so I think that sort of response rate, again, is a meaningful response rate, and there are a number of other studies that are going with the other different PD-1 or PD-L1 inhibitors, alone or in combination with CTLA-4 inhibitors.

Dr. Horn:  The pembrolizumab study, from what I remember, was only in PD-L1-positive patients.

Dr. Solomon:  I think that’s right, and we may talk about PD-L1 as a biomarker later, but I think an interesting observation was that the didn’t find that the degree of PD-L1 scoring correlated with the likelihood of response, in mesothelioma.