A new study from Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center reporting the findings of the first clinical trial to evaluate the immune effects of high-dose radiation therapy followed by surgery in patients with advanced kidney cancer may also set the stage for combination treatments with immunotherapy.

BUFFALO, N.Y. — The class of immunotherapies known as checkpoint inhibitors have proven to be a highly effective and advantageous treatment option for many cancer patients, but they don’t work well for everyone, and oncologists have no reliable way to determine in advance which patients are likely to respond to these drugs.

An international team of researchers has performed a follow-up analysis based on a large clinical study of a maintenance therapy for patients with multiple myeloma. Philip McCarthy, MD, of Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center was principal investigator of a phase III study that showed that treatment with lenalidomide following autologous hematopoietic stem cell transplant improved both progression-free survival and overall survival for newly diagnosed multiple myeloma patients.

Kunle Odunsi, MD, PhD, FRCOG, FACOG, Deputy Director of Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, will give an update about an ongoing clinical trial at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) 53rd Annual Meeting in Chicago. Dr. Odunsi, who is also Chair of Gynecologic Oncology and Executive Director of the Center for Immunotherapy at Roswell Park, will report on the status and methods of the clinical study, which is assessing the safety and antitumor activity of an approach that employs T-cell engineering to stimulate the immune system against ovarian cancer.

More than 10 teams from Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center have been invited to present research at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) 53rd Annual Meeting in Chicago. The research presentations cover a wide range of disciplines, treatment approaches and cancer types, including a unique form of immunotherapy for ovarian cancer, promising results on a new treatment approach for Hodgkin lymphoma in children and young adults and an effort to build a predictive tool to determine which patients are most likely to respond well to checkpoint inhibitors.

New research to be presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) 53rd Annual Meeting in Chicago shows that a previously untested combination of a monoclonal antibody-drug conjugate with a common chemotherapy agent has a high complete-response rate in children and young adults with relapsed or refractory Hodgkin lymphoma. This cooperative-group clinical trial, Children’s Oncology Group study AHOD1221 (NCT01780662), was led by Kara Kelly, MD, Waldemar J. Kaminski Endowed Chair of Pediatrics at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center.