Ipilimumab, an antibody that blocks cytotoxic T lymphocyte antigen 4 (CTLA-4), had shown improved overall survival (OS) for patients with metastatic melanoma. However predictive biomarkers for clinical benefit have not been well defined. We aimed to evaluate serum vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) and its association with clinical benefit and OS for ipilimumab treated advanced melanoma patients. Sera were collected from 176 patients treated with ipilimumab at 3 (n=98) or 10 mg/kg (n=68) from 2005 to 2013. We analyzed serum VEGF at baseline and at the end of induction (week 12) by Meso Scale Discovery kit. The association VEGF with clinical benefit and OS was analyzed using Fisher's exact test and Kaplan-Meier log-rank test. Pre-treatment VEGF value correlated with clinical benefit for 157 melanoma patients with the availability of clinical response at wk24 (p=0.0111) using 43 pg/ml as the cutoff of baseline VEGF value defined by maximally selected log-rank statistics. High level of soluble pre-therapy VEGF (≥ 43 pg/ml) in blood was associated with decreased OS, as compared to low level baseline VEGF ( < 43 pg/ml) (Median OS 6.6 vs 12.9 months , p=0.006 for all 176 patients; median OS 7.4 vs 14.3 months, p=0.037 for 3 mg/kg group; median OS 6.2 vs 10.9 months, p=0.048 for 10 mg/kg group, respectively). High level of soluble VEGF at wk12 was correlated with OS in all patients as well (p=0.023). There was no correlation between the change of VEGF and clinical outcome. Serum VEGF may be a predictive biomarker to ipilimumab treatment, and prospective investigation warranted.
. 2013 Nov 7;1(Suppl 1):P247. doi: 10.1158/2326-6066.CIR-13-0163
Pre-treatment serum vascular endothelial growth factor is associated with clinical response and overall survival in advanced melanoma patients treated with ipilimumab
Jianda Yuan
1,#, Jun Zhou
5,#, Zhiwan Dong
1, Sapna Tandon
1, Deborah Kuk
3, Katherine S Panageas
3, Philip Wong
1, Jedd D Wolchok
1,2,4, F Stephen Hodi
5,✉
Jianda Yuan
1Ludwig Center for Cancer Immunotherapy, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY, USA
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Jun Zhou
5Department of Medical Oncology, Center for Immuno-oncology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
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Zhiwan Dong
1Ludwig Center for Cancer Immunotherapy, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY, USA
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Sapna Tandon
1Ludwig Center for Cancer Immunotherapy, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY, USA
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Deborah Kuk
3Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistic, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY, USA
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Katherine S Panageas
3Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistic, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY, USA
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Philip Wong
1Ludwig Center for Cancer Immunotherapy, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY, USA
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Jedd D Wolchok
1Ludwig Center for Cancer Immunotherapy, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY, USA
2Department of Medicine, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY, USA
4Weill Cornell Medical College of Cornell University, New York, NY, USA
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F Stephen Hodi
5Department of Medical Oncology, Center for Immuno-oncology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
Find articles by F Stephen Hodi
1Ludwig Center for Cancer Immunotherapy, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY, USA
2Department of Medicine, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY, USA
3Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistic, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY, USA
4Weill Cornell Medical College of Cornell University, New York, NY, USA
5Department of Medical Oncology, Center for Immuno-oncology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
✉
Corresponding author.
#
Contributed equally.
Supplement
Abstracts of the 28th Annual Scientific Meeting of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC)
Carl Ruby
This supplement has not been sponsored. The Supplement Editor declares that he has no competing interests.
Conference
8-10 November 2013
Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer 28th Annual Meeting
National Harbor, MD, USA
Collection date 2013.
Copyright © 2013 Yuan et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
PMCID: PMC3991109 NIHMSID: NIHMS547868 PMID: 24778276