Melanoma Update: 3 Important Trials from ESMO 2021

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

I'm Jeffrey Weber, a medical oncologist at the Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Cancer Center in New York City, and today I'd like to discuss three melanoma abstracts that were presented at the recent ESMO meeting held in Paris.

The first is the RELATIVITY-047 study. These were data presented by Steve Hodi at the meeting, and he discussed the updated results of a global, randomized, double-blind phase 2/3 study in which patients with previously untreated metastatic melanoma that was unresectable received either nivolumab at the standard 480 mg once every 4 weeks intravenously, or they got nivolumab ("nivo") plus the LAG-3 antibody relatlimab ("rela").

This was a very nice, large, 700-plus–person study with the primary endpoint of progression-free survival (PFS). Indeed, the updated PFS was positive, as previously presented at ASCONow, we see more updated data with further follow-up, where the hazard ratio for the superiority of the combination for PFS was 0.75. The median PFS was 10.1 months vs 4.6 for the control group that received nivolumab alone — again, more than a doubling of PFS with a break at 3 months, and the curves stay apart all the way. Very impressive data.