On October 22, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a supplemental new drug application (sNDA) for aprepitant (Cinvanti) injectable emulsion for intravenous (IV) use. The sNDA requested FDA approval to expand the recommended dosage to include the 130-mg single-dose regimen for...
Findings from the phase Ib KEYNOTE-013 and phase II KEYNOTE-170 trials reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology by Armand et al indicated that pembrolizumab is highly active in relapsed or refractory primary mediastinal large B-cell lymphoma (PMBCL). The KEYNOTE-170 trial supported the 2018...
As reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology by Argiris et al, the Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group (ECOG)-American College of Radiology Imaging Network Cancer Research Group–coordinated phase III E1305 trial has shown no overall survival benefit with the addition of bevacizumab to...
Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center has announced the promotion of staff member Thaer Khoury, MD, to Chief of Breast Pathology within the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, at the Center’s campus in Buffalo, New York. Dr. Khoury has served on staff at Roswell Park since 2006,...
NYU Langone Health has become one of 23 institutions selected for inclusion in the American Association for Thoracic Surgery’s Thoracic Surgery Oncology Group (TSOG). A North American thoracic surgery clinical trials network, TSOG aims to improve the understanding of thoracic oncologic diseases and ...
The National Institutes of Health(NIH) has recently announced the names of two recipients of the 2019 Director’s Pioneer Awards whose research focuses on cell biology: Jennifer H. Elisseeff, PhD, is focusing onregenerative immunotherapies, and Valentina Greco, PhD, is studying the role of stem...
The American College of Clinical Pharmacology (ACCP) presented Peter Wiernik, MD, with the Nathaniel T. Kwit Memorial Distinguished Service Award at the ACCP’s Annual Meeting in September. Dr. Wiernik is Director of the Cancer Research Foundation of New York. The Nathaniel T. Kwit Memorial...
In a post hoc 5-year follow-up of the KEYNOTE-006 trial reported in The Lancet Oncology, Caroline Robert, MD, of Institut Gustave Roussy, Université Paris-Sud, and colleagues found that pembrolizumab maintained overall and progression-free survival benefits over ipilimumab in advanced melanoma.1 In ...
A new study has found that oncology massage therapy can provide symptomatic relief for a common and difficult-to-treat side effect of cancer treatment. Patients with chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy experienced a sustained reduction in lower-extremity pain up to 6 weeks after completion...
Pain is one of the most common symptoms associated with cancer and its treatment, and feelings of anxiety and depression can intensify the level of pain patients experience, according to the results from a study by Galloway et al that will be presented at the 2019 Supportive Care in Oncology...
On October 18, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a supplemental biologics license application (sBLA) for romiplostim (Nplate) to include new data in its U.S. prescribing information showing sustained platelet responses in adults with immune thrombocytopenia. The updated...
A study investigating the utilization of hospice care among racial/ethnic minority patients following treatment for pancreatic cancer has found that African American and Hispanic patients who underwent surgical removal of the pancreas were less likely than white patients to use hospice services at...
Chair of the German Breast Group, Sibylle Loibl, MD, of the University of Frankfurt, commented as a formal discussant of MONALEESA-3 and MONARCH 2. “It’s great to see overall survival in the first- and second-line metastatic breast cancer settings. We haven’t seen that in many years,” she said....
CDK4/6 inhibitors clearly improve overall survival in advanced breast cancer, as this prized endpoint was robustly demonstrated in two landmark phase III trials reported at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress 2019. Dennis J. Slamon, MD, PhD, of the University of California,...
The advent of new targeted agents for chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) has ushered in a golden age of treatment, leading to longer, more durable periods of disease control. Not all oncologists are convinced, however, that improvements in progression-free survival alone warrant dispensing with...
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by,And that has made all the difference.” –Robert Frost One of the first patients I encountered after residency was a 26-year-old woman with a single brain metastasis from melanoma. For anonymity, let’s call her Anna. Anna had just...
Nationally regarded melanoma researcher Mary J.C. Hendrix, PhD, was born in La Jolla, California, a seaside community surrounded by ocean bluffs and beaches within the city of San Diego. She was reared in a Navy family that moved from the West Coast to the East Coast during her childhood,...
Although the role of radiotherapy in chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy for lymphoma is still evolving, radiotherapy “would be an ideal bridging therapy” for patients with chemorefractory diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, stated George Mikhaeel, MD, Professor of Radiation Oncology and...
Ovarian cancer is typically a second-tier newsmaker at the world’s premier oncology conferences, but at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress 2019, this tumor type generated universal buzz. Impressive findings were presented for three PARP inhibitors in front-line maintenance...
Formal discussant Sherene Loi, MD, PhD, Professor of Cancer Therapeutics at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, Melbourne, Australia, characterized the results of KEYNOTE-522 as “exciting.” “This is the first phase III neoadjuvant study in triple-negative breast cancer. Despite breast cancer not...
Immunotherapy has changed the treatment paradigms for melanoma, lung cancer, bladder cancer, and renal cancer. Now, checkpoint inhibitor therapy is making inroads in triple-negative breast cancer—one of the most difficult-to-treat aggressive types of breast cancer. The addition of the checkpoint...
Kelvin Kar-Wing Chan, MD, PhD, a medical oncologist and Associate Scientist at Odette Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, Toronto, commented that from the patient’s perspective, rising cancer costs can lead to financial hardship, whether material (ie, medical debts and bankruptcy) or psychological...
Tyrosine kinase inhibitors have changed the paradigm of care for advanced EGFR- and ALK-positive non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), but not all patients taking these drugs may receive the same benefit. The results of a recent retrospective analysis suggest that higher out-of-pocket costs for...
A new model works to determine which genetic mutations may respond best to treatment with immunotherapy. Richman et al published the data on the model’s development in Cell Systems, and the algorithm, antigen.garnish, is already available online as an open source technology to serve as a resource. ...
In a phase Ib trial reported in The Lancet Oncology, Naing et al found that the combination of pegilodecakin (pegylated interleukin [IL]-10) with the programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1) inhibitor pembrolizumab or nivolumab was active in previously treated advanced solid tumors. In the study,...
As reported by Leiter et al in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, the final analysis of the German phase III DeCOG-SLT trial have shown no distant metastasis-free survival, recurrence-free survival, or overall survival benefit with complete lymph node dissection vs observation in patients with...
In an analysis of the phase III TITAN trial reported in The Lancet Oncology, Neeraj Agarwal, MD, and colleagues found that that treatment with apalatuamide was associated with preserved health-related quality of life, including pain and fatigue outcomes, in patients with metastatic...
Tailored exercise may help to minimize cardiotoxicity in patients with cancer, according to a report published by D’Ascenzi et al in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology. Cardiovascular diseases are common side effects in patients with cancer. This is the result of cardiotoxicity, whereby...
Recently, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted Fast Track designation to a therapy for steroid-refractory acute graft-vs-host disease and granted Orphan Drug designation to a therapy for peripheral T-cell lymphoma. Fast Track Designation for T-Guard in Steroid-Refractory Acute...
In an analysis reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Evron et al found that patients with thyroid cancer who were declared disease-free after initial treatment were more likely to have increased numbers of physician visits and imaging tests if they reported a generalized preference for...
In a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) pooled analysis reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Howie et al found that progression-free survival and benefit were similar for older vs younger postmenopausal women treated with combined cyclin-dependent kinase 4/6 (CDK4/6) plus aromatase...
Using virtual, cloud-based, interconnected computing techniques applied to 51,000 variables, researchers reduced the time needed to assess a patient’s tumor profile and suitability for clinical trials from 14 to 4 days. This method also increased the number of cases that could be assessed compared...
National lung cancer screening guidelines are inadequate to diagnose patients who contract lung cancer from occupational exposure, including first responders, according to a study reported by Vershalee Shukla, MD, at the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer’s (IASLC) North America ...
In a single-center phase II study reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Soff et al found that treatment with romiplostim was effective in rapidly correcting chemotherapy-induced thrombocytopenia, with maintenance treatment being effective in reducing risk of recurrent chemotherapy-induced...
As reported in The Lancet Oncology by Nakagawa et al, the phase III RELAY trial has shown that the addition of the VEGFR2 inhibitor ramucirumab to the EGFR inhibitor erlotinib improved progression-free survival in treatment-naive, advanced EGFR-mutated non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Study...
In a study reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Menzer et al found that combined BRAF/MEK inhibitor therapy appeared to be more active than single-inhibitor therapy in advanced melanoma with rare BRAF mutations. Study Details The study involved data from 103 patients with advanced melanoma ...
At a press conference at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress 2019, Pilar Garrido, MD, PhD, of Ramon y Cajal University Hospital, Madrid, commented on the FLAURA trial: “These results are good news for patients with lung cancer, which is the most common cause of cancer deaths. ...
First-line treatment with osimertinib extended overall survival compared with the older tyrosine kinase inhibitors gefitinib and erlotinib in patients with EGFR-mutated advanced non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), according to late-breaking final overall survival results of the phase III FLAURA...
Formal discussant of the ASCEND-7 trial, Lizza E. Hendriks, MD, PhD, of the Maastricht University Medical Center, The Netherlands, said that up to 50% of patients with non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) will develop central nervous system (CNS) metastases, and these patients can have poor quality...
The ALK inhibitor ceritinib demonstrated efficacy in patients with ALK-positive non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and active brain metastases, according to the results of the ASCEND-7 trial reported at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress 2019.1 Substantial intracranial...
A phase II study evaluating whether combining an investigational anti-GD2 monoclonal antibody with induction chemotherapy improved outcomes in children with newly diagnosed high-risk neuroblastoma found that the therapy significantly improved 2-year event-free survival. Furman et al published the...
A study published by Williams et al in JNCCN—Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network found that direct costs for patients with metastatic breast cancer increased when their treatment differed from recommendations found in the NCCN Clinical Practice Guidelines in Oncology® (NCCN...
As reported in The Lancet Oncology by Kato et al, the phase III ATTRACTION-3 trial conducted in predominantly Asian patients has shown a survival benefit with nivolumab vs paclitaxel or docetaxel in patients with advanced esophageal squamous cell carcinoma who were refractory to or intolerant of...
Over half of patients treated with the Bruton’s tyrosine kinase inhibitor ibrutinib developed new or worsened high blood pressure within 6 months of starting the medication, according to a study published by Dickerson et al in Blood. The analysis is also the first to tie ibrutinib-related...
In a Children’s Oncology Group (COG) study reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Kahn et al found that event-free survival in pediatric and adolescent patients with Hodgkin lymphoma was similar by race and ethnicity in COG trials, but that adjusted overall survival was better in white...
As reported in The British Medical Journal (BMJ) by Helsingen et al, a clinical practice guideline on colorectal cancer screening published as a BMJ Rapid Recommendations guideline indicates that previously unscreened individuals aged 50 to 79 years old with 15-year colorectal cancer risk of ≥ 3%...
Commenting on both RADICALS-RT and the meta-analysis, formal discussant Gert de Meerleer, MD, of the University Hospital, Leuven, Belgium, stated: “A big applause for these trials. I agree with both conclusions and congratulate both groups of authors for finding noncommercial funding.” Dr. de...
Early salvage radiotherapy appears to be a better choice after radical prostatectomy for men with prostate cancer than adjuvant radiotherapy, according to late-breaking results from the RADICALS-RT trial and the ARTISTIC meta-analysis of three trials that included RADICALS-RT. Observation after...
Paul B. Jacobsen, PhD, FASCO, Associate Director of the National Cancer Institute’s Division of Cancer Control and Population Science’s Healthcare Delivery Research Program, said that this study exemplifies the type of work that is needed to more broadly and rapidly translate promising research...
The results of simple interventions involving community health workers suggest that improvements in value-based cancer care need not come from health-care professionals. According to data presented at the 2019 ASCO Quality Care Symposium,1 reliance upon community health workers trained to assess...