ASCO 2025 | How can vusolimogene oderparepvec improve outcomes in melanoma?
Jason Luke, MD, FACP, FASCO, UPMC Hillman Cancer Center, Pittsburgh, PA, comments on the potential role of vusolimogene oderparepvec (RP1) in melanoma. The novel oncolytic viral therapy could be used in patients with systemic disease, expanding the landscape of patients who can benefit from injectable lesions, and potentially become the default treatment in the post-PD-1 setting for patients with poor performance status or those who cannot undergo tumor infiltrating lymphocyte (TIL) therapy. This interview took place during the 2025 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Meeting in Chicago, IL.
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Transcript
Yeah. So I think that the really important question will be is who are the patients where this would be optimally used in a clinic, right? And I think historically we’ve thought of oncolytic or intratumoral therapy as being patients with early-stage disease that have perhaps a single or only a couple of lesions near each other. The data for this molecule, though, suggest, you know, differently than that, that we can get a systemic response...
Yeah. So I think that the really important question will be is who are the patients where this would be optimally used in a clinic, right? And I think historically we’ve thought of oncolytic or intratumoral therapy as being patients with early-stage disease that have perhaps a single or only a couple of lesions near each other. The data for this molecule, though, suggest, you know, differently than that, that we can get a systemic response. And so what I think we’ll see is that the landscape of which patients we believe to have injectable lesions will start to expand. And we’re engaging with our colleagues in interventional radiology to actually do deep injections of the agent into tumors, say, in the lung, liver, spleen, etc. So I think, you know, it would be the first drug really approved for the post-PD-1 setting of a systemically administered agent. We do have TILs available, but obviously the TIL process is rather onerous, and many patients are not candidates for that due to the intensity of the treatment. So I really think this would become the default treatment in the post-PD-1 setting for patients who, you know, perhaps don’t have a great performance status or don’t want to go through the TIL process.
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