ASCO 2015

PDL1 expression in thymic tumours

Dr Giuseppe Giaccone - Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington, USA

You were discussing some abstracts, weren’t you?

Yes.

Would you give some highlights from that maybe, or anything that has caught your eye at the meeting?

Yes. There’s one thing that I’m going to discuss is two abstracts that look at PDL1 expression in thymic tumours. These are rare tumours but I’ve been doing research in these tumour types for a long, long time so I guess they asked me to do the discussion because of that. So essentially what both studies show is that there is high expression of PDL1 in thymic tumours in general; it seems to be a little higher in thymomas and thymic carcinomas. As a result of that actually I am doing a clinical study with a PD1 inhibitor in thymic carcinomas. We just started in March and the results are already very promising so that’s all I can say.

You can’t tell me what you’ve found so far?

There are responses. There are responses so it clearly seems that this type of drug has a really very broad spectrum of activity including in rare tumour types like thymic carcinomas. I hope we will be able to have enough patients in the study soon so that we can conclude that this is also an active indication.