Immunotherapy for Head and Neck Cancer

[Dr. Gopi Shah]
When you talk to patients about the checkpoint inhibitors and the drugs that are available, does it help them in terms of survival/cure, or does it buy them more time? Are you talking about months or years? talking years? Is it more symptom relief or palliation?

[Dr. Adam Luginbuhl]
For those listeners who see patients on a regular basis, or those who have a family member with cancer, this might help in some way. One of the beautiful things about this is most replicated and probably first produced in melanoma, and we're seeing the same thing in head and neck. It's this thing called the “long tail.”

Let's talk about chemotherapy first, as a baseline. You give someone chemotherapy A and then you give another patient chemotherapy B. And what we saw with chemotherapy, is that it maybe extended life for 6 or 10 months, but ultimately everybody in the group of really sick patients did not survive. We're not talking about curable people, we're talking about really sick ones.

With immunotherapy, we see a different curve. We see that curve where you not only have 6 or 7 months of progression-free survival and improvement, but you also have this long tail in about 15% to 20% of patients that just survive. We have beautiful pictures of these initial PET scans in people with melanoma everywhere-- bones, lungs, everywhere. And then the next PET scan, nothing. And they go on for 5, 10, 15, 20 years. That's revolutionary. That's new. That's a different expectation.