ASCO 2024 - Scot Ebbinghaus

Merck & Co (MSD outside the United States) celebrated the tenth anniversary of the first Keytruda approval at ASCO this year, but the company isn’t resting on its laurels.

At the conference this month, editor-in-chief Jonah Comstock caught up with Scot Ebbinghaus, vice president of clinical research at Merck, who spoke a bit about Keytruda’s anniversary, as well as a personal milestone – 25 years as a member of ASCO.

In the video below, Ebbinghaus talks a little bit about how he’s seen the oncology space change in that time, but he also talks a lot about the company’s big news at the show, their impressive phase 2b follow-up data on their collaboration with Moderna in melanoma – what’s often referred to as a cancer vaccine, but Merck prefers to call an individualised neoantigen therapy.

Ebbinghaus describes the mechanism of this INT, why it truly is a personalised medicine, and how Merck and Moderna are working together to make it scalable. There’s also a little talk about the company’s work in ADCs, as well as their KRAS inhibitor in NSCLC.

Tune in for a wide-ranging conversation about the present and future of immunotherapy.