Jason Williams, MD, on Intratumoral Immunotherapy Advances at SITC 2019

Jason Williams, MD, discusses the development of intratumoral immunotherapy, as well as trial results from his poster presentation at the 34th Annual Meeting & Pre-Conference Programs of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC 2019).

Transcription:

One of the things right now at SITC is the development of intratumoral immunotherapy, and of course, there are a lot of new agents that are coming up. A lot of these were discussed during talks. Also, a lot of evaluation of tumors to determine which immunotherapy drugs we should be using in patients.

It’s a rapidly advancing field and it is very exciting to get everybody together to discuss all of their new findings. 

Every year, this meeting is getting more and more advanced. We are getting more people involved. Immunotherapy is the hottest topic in cancer and so it’s just exciting to get all of these minds thinking alike together. Together we are really growing this field quickly and so I think next year we are going to be much closer to a cure for cancer.

My big work is using an OX40 agonist, CpG in ipilimumab (Yervoy) injected directly into tumors for solid cancers.

We presented our posted showing a complete response in a patient with breast cancer with brain metastases. It is interesting, we injected a liver tumor and yet we got a complete response, including the brain, even though nothing else was done for the patient – just from injecting the tumor in the liver.