Dana-Farber's Rebecca Porter, MD, PhD, says antibody-drug conjugate combined with immunotherapy had impressive overall response rate in 16 patients with a rare subtype, but more research is needed.
I think the first thing to note is this, this trial is really focusing on a patient population that has a huge unmet need. These are patients with serous endometrial cancer um which is a rare subtype, but it's the one of the most aggressive and accounts for the most um deaths within endometrial cancers. And it's an area where we really need novel therapies. And so the rationale is also unique for this trial. It's a, a combination of an antibody drug conjugate with an immunotherapy immune checkpoint inhibitor. And we know that both ad CS and immune checkpoint inhibitors can be active in endometrial cancers, but not all patients respond to them as single agents. And they also develop resistance. And so this trial combined the two to try to augment those responses. And I think the key takeaway is that within a small um patient population, we treated 16 patients so far in this trial. Um There was a really impressive overall response rate. So six patients had a response, one being a confirmed, complete response and then five partial responses, which is higher than we would expect for these agents alone. And within that two patients had really what we would call exceptional responses. So they had a, a duration of response for uh about 12 months and 18 months. Um And so I think one of the, the, the most important next step is to really dig into what the characteristics and biomarkers are for those exceptional responses and how we may be able to improve our therapy, to overcome the resistance that might be seen in other patients and, and to extend that duration of response to everybody.
