Jonathan Riess, MD, UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center, Sacramento, California, discusses phase 2 study results which demonstrated that IO102-IO103 plus pembrolizumab shows clinical promise as a first-line treatment option for patients with advanced squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck. 

Dr Riess presented these results at the 2024 European Society of Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress in Barcelona, Spain. 

Transcript: 

Hi, my name is Dr Jonathan Riess from UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center. I'm here at the ESMO Congress to describe a poster that I presented of a study of IO102-IO103 and pembrolizumab in patients with advanced metastatic head and neck squamous cell carcinoma. 

What the study did was take patients who had advanced metastatic head and neck squamous cell carcinoma with high [combined positive score] CPS, where standard-of-care treatment is immunotherapy with pembrolizumab and then this study added the immunomodulatory peptide vaccine IO102-IO103. IO102-IO103 as I mentioned is an immunomodulatory peptide vaccine against IDO and PD-L1 with the goal of creating a more favorable tumor immune microenvironment for immune checkpoint inhibition to work. 

In this study, we showed a response rate of about 45% in evaluable patients treated with IO102-IO103 and pembrolizumab who received at least 2 cycles or more of the vaccine study treatment. We also showed many of those responses were durable. The side effect profile was generally in line with what we observe with single-agent pembrolizumab, with the addition of some observations of injection site reactions to IO102-IO103, which were generally manageable and tolerable. 

The next future steps would be our hope to pursue a larger study to further support these results of intriguing potential activity of IO102-IO103 plus pembrolizumab.

Source: 

Riess JW, Spicer J, Seiwert T, et al. A phase II trial of the IO102-IO103 vaccine plus pembrolizumab: Completed cohort for first-line (1L) treatment of advanced squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck (SCCHN). Presented at 2024 ESMO Congress. September 13-17, 2024. Abstract 1022P