VIDEO: Botensilimab, balstilimab combination ‘huge innovation’ in colorectal cancer subset

In a video interview with Healio, Benjamin Schlechter, MD, of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, spoke about “the first combination to show efficacy in colorectal cancer in a specialized population.”

Presented at ASCO Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium, this expanded phase 1a/1b study showed that botensilimab (Agenus), a modified CTLA-4 inhibitor, plus balstilimab (Agenus), a modified PD-1 inhibitor, showed promising clinical activity with durable responses and was well tolerated in heavily pretreated metastatic patients with microsatellite stable colorectal cancer.

“We saw very impressive efficacy … over 70% of disease control rate, which were people with either minimal growth or minimal shrinkage, and over 20% had objective responses, some of which were near complete responses and many of which are prolonged,” Schlechter said.

Schlechter also noted a randomized phase 2 study has launched. Although he said there are still “several things we have to figure out” about botensilimab, he thinks “we’re going to see a lot from this drug.”

“There’s a lot to come on this drug, but for patients with nonhepatic disease … this is a huge innovation,” he said. “It’s a very effective combination, a very safe combination when management of toxicity is done carefully, and it really is so much better — in a non-comparative sense — than [trifluridine/tipiracil (Lonsurf; Taiho Oncology, Servier)] or regorafenib [Stivarga, Bayer]. We will see in the randomized phase 2 if that will come to fruition, but as someone who has given a lot of Lonsurf, a lot of regorafenib and a lot of this drug — it’s just in a different league.”

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