Ira Winer, MD, PhD, on Surprising Findings From ARTISTRY-1 in Ovarian Cancer

During The Society of Gynecologic Oncology (SGO) 2022 Annual Meeting on Women’s Cancer, CancerNetwork® spoke with Ira Winer, MD, PhD, FACOG, a gynecologic oncologist at the Karmanos Cancer Center and associate professor in the Division of Gynecologic Oncology at Wayne State University in Detroit, about responses from the phase 1/2 ARTISTRY-1 trial (NCT02799095) in patients with pretreated platinum-resistant ovarian cancer who received nemvaleukin alfa (ALKS 4230) plus pembrolizumab (Keytruda), and why he was surprised by the outcome.

Transcript:

The findings in general were surprising. What I mean by that is we know historically the response rates with single-agent immunotherapy in ovarian cancer have been relatively low, even in the 10% to 15% range. Even in those patients who do respond, the actual percentage of patients who have a significant clinical benefit, more than a month or 2 of sustained response, was also extremely low. When we combined this engineered IL-2 [interleukin-2] agent along with pembrolizumab, we anticipated that we would see, at the very least, pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic response. [However,] seeing extreme responses in these patients who have been heavily pretreated was very surprising in a good way. Again, even for those patients who perhaps did not have an objective response, [seeing] sustained disease in patients who have been heavily pretreated for well over a year, which gives at the same time significant quality of life, is also very important.

Reference

Winer I. Clinical outcomes of ovarian cancer patients treated with the novel engineered cytokine nemvaleukin alfa in combination with the PD-1 inhibitor pembrolizumab: recent data from ARTISTRY-1. Poster presented at: 2022 SGO Annual Meeting on Women’s Cancer; March 18-21, 2022; Phoenix, Arizona.