In Refractory Melanoma, Immunotherapy plus HDAC Inhibitor Yields 'Impressive Results'

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Hello. This is Dr Jeffrey Weber, deputy director of the Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Cancer Center at NYU Langone Health in New York City. Today I want to report a very interesting abstract just presented at the 2019 AACR (American Association for Cancer Research) meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, a study presented orally by Ryan Sullivan^[1] from the Massachusetts General Hospital.

In this trial, patients with PD1 refractory melanoma received the combination of the PD1 inhibitory antibody pembrolizumab plus the histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitor entinostat, which is an oral drug. This was a phase 2, open-label study. There were a total of 53 patients with recurrent or metastatic melanoma. All of them had ultimately progressed, but not all of them had no response to previous treatment, meaning they were not primarily refractory patients. For example, seven of the 53 had prior objective responses to frontline PD1 inhibition, including one with a complete response, and 20 of them had prior stable disease. But all of them, of course, had progressed before entering the study.

Pembrolizumab was given intravenously at the standard dose of 200 mg every 3 weeks, and entinostat was given orally at 5 mg once a week.