UPDATE: This study has been completed with the full analysis of all 54 patients. Click here for full results.
Earlier this month, during the most recent meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), first results from a new study are bound to bring hope to the mesothelioma community.
The aptly named DREAM study coming out of Australia is one of the first of its kind in mesothelioma, and so far, its results look very promising.
“We’ve recently seen that combining chemotherapy and immunotherapy can help people with lung cancer live longer,” said the principal investigator of the study, Anna Nowak, MD, PhD, of the University of Western Australia (and a member of our Science Advisory Board). “The DREAM study results are the first evidence that the same strategy may be helpful in mesothelioma,” she added.
Dr. Nowak’s study takes the two most promising treatment approaches tested in mesothelioma, neither of which is a silver bullet – Alimta/cisplatin with a roughly 40% response rate, and immunotherapy with a 20% response rate – and combines them together in this Phase 2 clinical trial in hopes of a synergistic outcome.
Phase 2 clinical trials are designed to evaluate the response of a drug (or a combination of drugs, as the case may be), so they’re not built to compare certain treatments against others nor do they enroll enough patients for comparison type analyses. However, data collected even in such small trials can provide valuable signals about whether an approach is worth investigating further.
About the Study – A Phase 2 Trial of DuRvalumab with First Line chEmotherApy in Mesothelioma with a Safety Run In
Patients were first treated with Alimta (pemetrexed)/cisplatin along with an immunotherapeutic drug called Durvalumab, after which, during the maintenance stage of the trial, chemotherapy was dropped and immunotherapy continued. From the first 31 patients for whom data has been analyzed, 65% saw a partial response of varying degrees.
However, as Dr. Nowak cautions us, these results are still early and from a small number of treated patients.
“Confirming these results in mesothelioma in a larger study is of the utmost priority, and I urge the mesothelioma community to support a definitive clinical trial of chemoimmunotherapy,” she stated.
The toxicities associated with this trial were similar to what would normally be observed with either chemo or immunotherapy alone, and ranged between grade 1 – 3.
As patients learn of this relatively new approach, which has seen success in lung cancer research, the Meso Foundation encourages them to enroll in a clinical trial whenever possible in order to capture these valuable data.
UPDATED: In the United States, a similar trial led by Dr. Patrick Forde of Johns Hopkins Phase II MEDI4736 in Combination With Chemotherapy for First-Line Treatment of Unresectable Mesothelioma (PrE0505) has accrued patients ahead of schedule and is now in the analysis phase.
