The CR UK & UCL Cancer Trials Centre has announced the opening of a UK-based cancer trial called ANIMATE, supported by Bristol-Myers Squibb.
The study is assessing how effective the use of the drug nivolumab is for patients with Hodgkin lymphoma who have relapsed after their initial treatment and for whom subsequent treatment has not been effective.
Patients taking part in the study will have been diagnosed with classical Hodgkin lymphoma and have undergone chemotherapy which either did not eliminate their disease, or initially eliminated a disease which has since returned. After completing up to two further courses of chemotherapy, which is known as salvage therapy, eligible patients can take part in the ANIMATE trial, where they will be offered nivolumab in an attempt to eliminate their disease or help control it to allow them to receive a stem cell transplant.
Nivolumab is an anti-PD1 monoclonal antibody that blocks the PD1 protein from forming on the surface of cells. This process normally regulates inflammation as a reaction to foreign bodies, but when the protein forms on cancer cells it can prevent the immune system from destroying them. By disrupting this function with nivolumab, cancer cells are more susceptible to the immune system and less able to repair themselves.
ANIMATE is now open to recruitment. With the first patient having started trial treatment in January, researchers will require up to 120 patients to take part and, of those, they hope 30 will be eligible to receive treatment with nivolumab. The trial will open in up to 30 hospital sites across the UK and is due to complete recruitment by December 2021.
More details on the trial can be found here.