The important ADMIRAL trial, reported by Perl et al in The New England Journal of Medicine and reviewed in this issue of The ASCO Post, shows the efficacy of a specific FLT3 inhibitor in patients with advanced acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and enhances the era of personalized medicine in leukemia.

We’ll start off this week on The ASCO Post Podcast by discussing results from the MEDALIST trial of luspatercept in transfusion-dependent lower-risk myelodysplastic syndromes...

On December 27, 2019, the poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP) inhibitor olaparib was approved for the maintenance treatment of adult patients with deleterious or suspected deleterious germline BRCA-mutated metastatic pancreatic adenocarcinoma, as detected by a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved test, whose disease has not progressed on at least 16 weeks of a first-line platinum-based chemotherapy regimen. The FDA also approved the BRACAnalysis CDx test as a companion diagnostic for the selection of patients with pancreatic cancer for treatment with olaparib based upon the identification of deleterious or suspected deleterious germline mutations in BRCA1 or BRCA2.

A weekly schedule of nab-paclitaxel as part of neoadjuvant chemotherapy significantly improved pathologic complete response compared with nab-paclitaxel given 2 weeks out of every 3 weeks (2/3) in patients with primary breast cancer, with a greater magnitude of benefit in patients with triple-negative breast cancer. However, the addition of the RANK ligand inhibitor denosumab to neoadjuvant chemotherapy had no impact on pathologic complete response. These preliminary findings of the pathologic complete response rates in the GeparX study were presented at the 2019 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.