BARCELONA, Spain — Adding a second immunotherapy from Bristol Myers Squibb to an existing checkpoint inhibitor and chemotherapy improved responses for certain patients with a type of lung cancer, steering the approach into a Phase 3 study.
The Phase 2 RELATIVITY-104 trial was another hurdle for Bristol’s Opdualag, which is essentially a combination of the company’s powerhouse PD-1 inhibitor Opdivo and relatlimab, which targets another checkpoint called LAG-3. Opdualag is approved in advanced melanoma, but the drug has failed in some colorectal and liver cancer indications. The dose tested in the lung cancer study was higher than the one approved in melanoma.
The new study tested relatlimab with Opdivo and chemotherapy versus Opdivo and chemotherapy alone as a first-line treatment in advanced non-small cell lung cancer, with the aim to find which patients benefited from adding the anti-LAG-3 drug to the backbone of chemotherapy and immunotherapy, Samit Hirawat, Bristol’s chief medical officer, told STAT.
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