Dr. Diwakar Davar and Dr. Jason Luke, both of the University of Pittsburgh’s Hillman Cancer Center, highlight key advances in early phase therapeutics and immunotherapy that were featured at the 2022 ASCO Annual Meeting and also address toxicities, including immune checkpoint inhibitor-associated myocarditis. TRANSCRIPT Dr. Diwakar Davar: Hello, and welcome to the ASCO Daily News Podcast. My name is Dr. Diwakar Davar, and I’m an assistant professor of Medical Oncology, specializing in melanoma and phase 1 therapeutics at the University of Pittsburgh’s Hillman Cancer Center. I am the guest host of today’s podcast. My guest today is Dr. Jason Luke, a colleague and the director of the Cancer Immunotherapeutics Center at the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center here.  Today, we’ll be discussing advances in early-phase therapeutics and immunotherapy that were featured at the 2022 ASCO Annual Meeting.   You’ll find our full disclosures in the show notes, and the disclosures of all guests on the podcast are available on our transcripts at asco.org/podcasts.  Jason, thank you for coming on the podcast today.  Dr. Jason Luke: Thanks so much for the invitation. It was a great ASCO, and I hope everyone had a good time.  Dr. Diwakar Davar: So, onto our abstracts. So, the first one that we’ll be discussing, and Jason as you know we’ve done this before. We’ll be rapidly transitioning between phase 1 therapeutics, melanoma, and advanced phase 2 and 3 trials, but you know this is something you do very well. So Abstract 2504, it’s a phase 1 trial of TIM-3 inhibitor cobomilab immunotherapy and in combination with PD-1 inhibitors nivolumab and dostarlimab. The AMBER Trial that was presented recently, and in full disclosure, both you and I actually are on this abstract. So, what do you think of this abstract? What do you think of the data that is discussed, and how do we contextualize this in relation to what needs to be done in this space?  Dr. Jason Luke: So, I think this is an exciting abstract because it brings forward what may be the next high-priority immune checkpoint to try to target in clinical oncology. To level-set, I think everybody listening will know about PD-1 and CTLA-4 as immune checkpoints. In the last year, we’ve had LAG-3 come forward as now a standard of care element of armamentarium in melanoma, and we look forward to further studies of LAG-3 and other tumor types as we think it should be a good partner where PD-1 is otherwise approved.  So here now, we hear about TIM-3, which is another negative regulatory checkpoint on a number of different immune subsets. And in this abstract, the antibody targeting TIM-3 was cobolimab. So, TIM-3 is a very interesting molecule. It has, what you might call, pleiotropic effects in the immune system. So, while in the context of this abstract, it was being targeted as another immune checkpoint on T cells, it’s important to point out that TIM-3 has other regulatory roles in other immune subsets such as myeloid cells and very particularly dendritic cells, and that’s important because it might bring in another element of the innate immune system to try to drive anti-tumor responses. So, it’s an exciting target because it might be able to expand the groups of patients who could benefit from immune checkpoint blockade.  So, in this abstract, we see initially the phase 1 data of combining cobolimab, anti-TIM-3 with anti-PD-1 of a couple of different flavors. And what you could take from this abstract is that in the phase 1 setting, the drug was well-tolerated and combined well, and had pharmacokinetic properties that would be consistent with what we’d expect for this kind of a monoclonal antibody. I think we have to marry this abstract, which is really the phase 1 data about safety in pharmacokinetic (PK) to another abstract presented in the melanoma session, which showed an expansion cohort of patients who got cobolimab plus nivolumab or dostarlimab.  And there we did see a 50% response r