Congratulations to our Clinician-Scientist A/Prof Oliver Klein, whose paper on the first patient cohort of the phase II MoST CIRCUIT clinical trial was published last week.
The manuscript was published in the prestigious journal JAMA Oncology and accompanied by an editorial emphasising the significance of the findings.
The MoST-CIRCUIT trial, sponsored by ONJCRI, enrolled 240 patients with selected advanced rare cancers across Australia and New Zealand, studying the usage of combination immunotherapy using the drugs nivolumab and ipilimumab. These drugs work by helping the immune system recognise and attack cancer cells.
Gynaecological clear cell cancers are aggressive malignancies that do not respond well to chemotherapy, and patients with advanced disease have limited treatment options and an overall poor prognosis.
The MoST-CIRCUIT results were highly promising, with half of the trial participants with gynaecological clear cell cancers seeing their tumours shrink or disappear, and many still doing well months after treatment.
A/Prof Klein said:
“Recurrent and metastatic gynaecological clear cancers have low response rates to conventional chemotherapy and combination immunotherapy in this patient population.
“For these people with an unmet medical need, this treatment option constitutes a real game changer.”
The overall response was high and long-lasting, suggesting that combination immunotherapy is a promising treatment option for people with these hard-to-treat cancers.
The trial results have already led to efforts to initiate follow-up trials aiming to establish combination immunotherapy as standard treatment in this patient population.
Thank you to Bristol Myers-Squibb, Omico, La Trobe University and the Minderoo Foundation for making this rare cancers clinical trial possible.
Read the full paper.