Dr. Matulonis on CPS as a Potential Biomarker in Advanced Recurrent Ovarian Cancer

Ursula A. Matulonis, MD, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, as well as a medical oncologist and chief of the Division of Gynecologic Oncology of the Susan F. Smith Center for Women's Cancers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, discusses the potential role of combined positive score (CPS) as a biomarker in advanced recurrent ovarian cancer.

The results from the KEYNOTE-100 trial demonstrated modest clinical activity with pembrolizumab (Keytruda), and a trend toward increased overall response rate with higher PD-L1 expression was observed in both cohorts analyzed. Now that results from the KEYNOTE-100 trial have been read-out, the company that sponsored the trial should be asked what they are going to do with these data, says Matulonis. Obviously, clinicians can do what they like with these data, especially in a patient who is heavily pretreated, says Matulonis.

However, oncologists need to make sure that the pathologist they are working with generates a PD-L1 expression score by this CPS, because it was the way that PD-L1 expression levels were measured and read-out on this trial, explains Matulonis. The trial was not simply looking at PD-L1 expression of the cancer cells, concludes Matulonis.