News Briefs

✦ Bristol Myers Squibb will voluntarily withdraw the U.S. indication for Opdivo (nivolumab) as a monotherapy for people with hepatocellular carcinoma who previously were treated with sorafenib. The move follows an April meeting of the agency’s Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee to discuss whether to keep certain indications for a handful of checkpoint inhibitors that target programmed death-1/programmed death-ligand 1 (PD-1/PD-L1) and received accelerated approval but had not met post-marketing requirements demonstrating confirmatory benefit. Opdivo received a negative vote for this indication, as did Merck & Co., Inc.’s Keytruda (pembrolizumab) for the treatment of people with recurrent locally advanced or metastatic gastric or gastroesophageal junction adenocarcinoma whose tumors express PD-L1 with disease progression on or after at least two lines of therapy including fluoropyrimidine- and platinum-containing chemotherapy and, if appropriate, human epidermal growth factor receptor 2/neu-targeted therapy. Merck said recently that it would voluntarily withdraw that indication in the U.S.

✦ Bristol Myers Squibb also will withdraw the indication for Istodax (romidepsin) as monotherapy for the treatment of peripheral T-cell lymphoma in adults who have received at least one prior therapy. The FDA initially gave the drug from Celgene Corp., now a Bristol Myers Squibb subsidiary, accelerated approval. A confirmatory Phase III trial did not meet the primary efficacy endpoint of progression free survival.

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