Dr. Agarwala on Entinostat for Patients with Melanoma Who Progress on PD-1/PD-L1 Blockade

Sanjiv S. Agarwala, MD, chief of medical oncology and hematology, St. Luke’s Cancer Center, professor of medicine, Temple University School of Medicine, discusses the impact of entinostat for patients with melanoma who progress on a PD-1/PD-L1 blocking antibody.

Pembrolizumab (Keytruda) is a PD-1 inhibitor that has shown efficacy in melanoma, Agarwala says. Unfortunately, there are a number of patients who either don’t respond to immunotherapy or become refractory to treatment over time. One of the most common ongoing questions in oncology is to figure out how to make immunotherapy-refractory patients respond to this type of treatment again. There have been many combinations designed to do just that, with one of them including HDAC inhibitors like entinostat, which affect the tumor microenvironment.

The design of the study Agarwala presented at the 2018 ASCO Annual Meeting took patients with melanoma who became refractory to anti—PD-1/PD-L1 treatment and determine whether they would respond to pembrolizumab with the addition of entinostat.