Cancer Drug Shows Promising Results in Clinical Trial

An international, early-phase clinical trial has found a “two-for-one” cancer immunotherapy, tebotelimab, is potentially more effective and at least as safe as standard immunotherapies. The findings, which involved hundreds of patients with different types of advanced solid tumors or blood cancers, could lead to a new path for bispecific therapies that more efficiently unleash the patient’s own immune system to eliminate the cancer.

The study enrolled 269 patients with advanced disease, including types of ovarian, breast, head and neck, cervical and lymphoma cancers. Tumor size decreased in 34 percent of eligible participants. The researchers took the trial a step further and enrolled another 84 patients with advanced cancers positive for a protein called HER2 to test tebotelimab combined with an approved drug for HER2-positive cancer, called margetuximab. The response rate in those participants was 19 percent, which Jason Luke, MD, director of the Immunotherapy and Drug Development Center at UPMC Hillman and associate professor of hematology and oncology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, said was impressive given the response rate is usually closer to 0 percent in these particular patients.

“No approved cancer drugs are like this. It is truly a novel development in the field,” said Dr. Luke. “The patients in our trial had cancers that were not responding to other therapies, so to see double-digit response rates is encouraging.”

Dr. Luke says the next step is to develop a biomarker test that will tell doctors which patients have cancers that are expressing the proteins that tebotelimab is designed to block and then conduct another trial to see if outcomes are improved further. Additionally, future trials could test the immunotherapy in combination with chemotherapy or radiation.