BSH 2024 | Phase II ANIMATE trial investigating PET response-adapted treatment using nivolumab in R/R cHL

So, I was really pleased to bring and present the first data here at BSH 2024 on the UK Phase II study called ANIMATE. This is a study in relapsed/refractory classical Hodgkin lymphoma. It’s looking at patients with relapsed disease, so that’s about 10 to 25% of people who are treated with frontline therapy still relapse. And currently, those patients receive first-line relapse multi-agent chemotherapy and are bridged to an autologous stem cell transplant. Now, what we know is that people who do well from that autologous transplant generally have better responses to that first-line combination chemotherapy regime, and sometimes, if you don’t have a very good response, you need to switch to a second-line relapse treatment in order to get a better response before going for the autologous transplant. And what this trial was looking at, is taking those patients who had not responded optimally to the first-line relapse treatment and giving them nivolumab rather than, for example, brentuximab, and seeing really how well they do then with subsequent autologous stem cell transplantation. And we were particularly looking at the overall response rate, that was our primary endpoint, to 4 or 8 cycles of nivolumab. And basically what the trial showed was that the response rate, which was our primary endpoint, was about 42%. Now, that was perhaps a little bit disappointing based on previous information we were expecting more around the 60% mark. However, what was really interesting from this data is that response to treatment after nivolumab was actually very high, with a number of complete metabolic remissions, sometimes in patients who had never responded to any chemotherapy before in their treatment pathway. Most patients did still get to a stem cell transplant after the nivolumab, and actually, those who got to an autograft with a median follow-up of 22 months, we haven’t yet seen a relapse. So, I think what this speaks to is that even in those patients where the nivolumab hasn’t worked, it does seem to be sensitizing them to subsequent treatments. And this chemosensitization is, I think, a real phenomenon with PD1 inhibitors, and it’s great to see some prospective data backing that up.