New and Emerging Targeted Therapies for Relapsing Ovarian Cancer

At the Great Debates & Updates in Women’s Oncology meeting, Colleen McCormick, MD, MPH, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico, gave an overview of new and emerging targeted therapies for patients with relapsing platinum-sensitive and platinum-resistant ovarian cancer.

Transcript:

I'm Colleen McCormick, I'm a [gynecological] oncologist, Associate Professor at the University of New Mexico, [New Mexico]. My job today was to go over really some of the updates on treatment of recurrent ovarian cancer. Ovarian cancer can be broken down into 2 types: either platinum-sensitive, which is disease that is recurred greater than 6 months after completion of platinum-based chemotherapy; or platinum-resistant, which is much worse, that is recurred within 6 months of completing chemotherapy.

We first talked about platinum-sensitive disease and the importance of assessing whether patients are eligible for a secondary cytoreductive surgery. Determining that is usually done in cohorts with a [gynecological] oncologist to determine if they'd be a surgical candidate and then we talked about some different chemotherapy options, and really talked about how the choice of what to pair with carboplatin is based around the patient’s length of time since their last treatment, what type of side effects they still have lingering from their last treatment.

Then we really went into talking about the platinum-resistant disease and some really exciting new prospects. The backbone of treatment for platinum-resistant disease for many years has been different types of chemotherapies, which all have a response rate of 10% to 15%, not so great. There are really exciting new options, one that's come out and is newly FDA-approved is called mervituximab [soravtansine]. This is an antibody drug conjugate (ADC), which is a little smart bomb for ovarian cancers that are [folate receptor] FRα-high and kind of attaches to those receptors and the tumor, gets taken into the tumor cells and then explodes and therefore is effective in those cases, and it showed an improvement in overall survival, which is really fantastic and has led to a new FDA approval.

Then, we talked about several different options that are in the pipeline, so things that are exciting are looking at different mechanisms. There are several other ADCs that are looking at HER2/neu receptors that's being looked at in all sorts of different cancers, including ovarian cancer. And then different mechanisms like relacorilant, which is looking at exploiting differences in cortisol and trying to decrease cortisol expression to help improve chemotherapy, how the chemotherapy works. Another agent that is looking at whether an interleukin, attempting at modifying interleukins, can allow us to utilize a better profile of immune response rather than kind of the immune response in general.

There are some really exciting new options that are coming forward for platinum-resistant ovarian cancer, which unfortunately has a really high unmet need. It’s important when thinking about platinum-resistant ovarian cancers to think about enrolling patients in clinical trials so that we can really move the needle forward for these women.

Source:

McCormick C. Relapsing ovarian cancer: Expert advice for selecting new and emerging targeted therapeutics. Presented at Great Debates & Updates in Women’s Oncology; November 1-3, 2023. Virtual.