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Monitoring Ipilimumab Response in Patients with Metastatic Melanoma
Wolfgang A. Weber, MD, Professor of Nuclear Medicine at the Technical University of Munich, Germany, spoke with Oncology Learning Network about the clinical significance of his team’s recent study, in which they evaluated the link between tumor response on 18F-FDG PET/CT and prognosis in patients with metastatic malignant melanoma treated with ipilimumab (J Nucl Med. 2019;60[3]:335-341).
What existing data led you to evaluate this association?
FDG PET/CT is used to monitor tumor response to other forms of therapy (eg, chemotherapy and radiotherapy), but there are few data addressing whether FDG PET/CT is equally useful for monitoring tumor response to immunotherapies, such as ipilimumab.
Please briefly describe your study and its findings. Were any of the outcomes particularly surprising?
There had been concerns that inflammatory reactions to ipilimumab could result in the FDG PET/CT scan being positive even when metastases had responded well to treatment.
This was not the case, at least for the time point that we studied (ie, after completion of ipilimumab therapy).
What are the possible real-world applications of these findings in clinical practice?
The risk of false positive FDG PET/CT scans after therapy with ipilimumab appears to be smaller than initially expected.
Do you and your co-investigators intend to expand upon this research?
Yes, we would like to study whether FDG PET/CT imaging can predict which patients will benefit from immunotherapy earlier in the course of therapy (eg, after only 1 administration of ipilimumab).
