Peripheral T-cell lymphomas (PTCLs) make up a small fraction of all non-Hodgkin lymphomas—just 15%—in the United States.1 Although rare in the United States, the incidence of PTCL is common across Asia, the Caribbean, and sub-Saharan Africa. Although the reason for such global variation in PTCL is...
CHECKPOINT INHIBITORS have rapidly become the standard of care as second-line treatment, and in some patients first-line treatment, of advanced bladder cancer. However, the majority of patients do not respond and eventually experience disease progression; these patients will need subsequent...
FOR THE TREATMENT of lymphoma, antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) are becoming an important class of drugs, as described at the 2018 Pan Pacific Lymphoma Conference by Brad Kahl, MD, Professor of Medicine at Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis.1 “We have one ADC—brentuximab vedotin...
FORMAL DISCUSSANT Parameswaran Hari, MD, of the Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, was impressed by many aspects of the bb2121 study, which represents the “largest and most mature” data set for the chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell approach in myeloma, he noted. According to Dr. Hari,...
In the December 10, 2017, issue of The ASCO Post, I authored an article in which I raised the possibility of curing follicular lymphoma without the dreaded chemotherapy. Clearly, no good deed goes unpunished: My good friend and The ASCO Post’s editor Jim Armitage, MD, challenged me to defend that...
Howard “Skip” Burris III, MD, FACP, FASCO, Chief Medical Officer and President of Clinical Operations at Sarah Cannon Cancer Center, Nashville, said the antibody-drug conjugates are especially attractive in triple-negative breast cancer. “We know chemotherapy is still effective in a large...
The roadside along the path to curing follicular lymphoma is riddled with the debris of failed cytotoxic regimens. For decades, clinical trials unsuccessfully pitted various chemotherapy combinations against each other. It took but a single, noncytotoxic molecule, rituximab (Rituxan), to forever...
The number of early-phase trials in oncology that adopted a seamless approach—as opposed to a traditional trial approach with defined phase I, II, and III plans—is rising, with data from the majority of them presented after 2014, according to a study presented by Barata et al at the...
The Lung Cancer Mutation Consortium at the University of Colorado Cancer Center reported that 24 of 920 patients (3%) with advanced-stage lung cancer in a recent study had mutations in the gene HER2. According to the study, published by Pillai et al in Cancer, 71% of these patients were...
According to Srikala S. Sridhar, MD, MSc, FRCPC, of the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, Toronto, Canada, “It’s an exciting time in the field of urothelial cancer,” thanks to the emergence of new therapies such as the immune checkpoint inhibitors and other approaches that aim to improve both...
Three years ago, early results from the U.S. Intergroup C10403 trial,1 which evaluated the effectiveness of treating adolescent and young adults (AYAs) with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) using an intensive pediatric regimen, showed significant improvement in event-free and overall survival...
A pair of scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have been awarded up to $3.3 million from the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to create the next generation of breast cancer treatments for the thousands of patients whose...
Howard A. “Skip” Burris, MD, President of Clinical Operations and Chief Medical Officer at Sarah Cannon Research Institute, Nashville, commented on the poster presentation for The ASCO Post. He said the results “fit the whole paradigm” that is desired for triple-negative breast cancer, which is to ...
“This study shows that a great deal of innovation can come from existing knowledge. The 7+3 regimen has been around since I was an intern,” admitted Armand Keating, MD, of the University of Toronto and Princess Margaret Hospital, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. “Using the liposomal formulation of...
Double-hit lymphomas are a challenging subset of high-grade B-cell lymphomas, previously characterized histologically as diffuse large B-cell lymphoma or B-cell lymphoma unclassifiable with intermediate features between diffuse large B-cell lymphoma and Burkitt lymphoma. Expert guidance in their...
Human epithelial cell adhesion molecule (EpCAM) is overexpressed in many cancers. Although anti-EpCAM antibodies have shown promise in preclinical studies, early-phase clinical evaluation of these antibodies has been disappointing. To determine whether the antitumor activity of anti-EpCAM antibody...
For years, adults with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) have been treated with intensive, multiagent, cytotoxic chemotherapy involving multiple rounds of treatment, derived from regimens that are highly effective in children. Although the survival of children with ALL hovers around 90%, less than ...
Commenting on both Dr. Baselga’s study in breast cancer and Dr. Liu’s study in ovarian cancer at the AACR press conference, Louis M. Weiner, MD, Director of the Georgetown University Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, Washington, DC, said that antibody-drug conjugates “represent the fulfillment...
In January, New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center opened the Center for Lymphoid Malignancies, a 3,700 square foot outpatient clinic, in the heart of Midtown Manhattan. The Center is solely focused on the treatment of all forms of Hodgkin and non-Hodgkin lymphoma,...
Follicular lymphoma is the second most common subtype of non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) in the United States. Of the nearly 70,000 new cases of NHL anticipated in 2013,1 approximately 7,000 to 13,000 (10%–19%) will be follicular lymphoma, by recent estimates.2-5 For many years, the median overall...
The term “novel agents” has been used for the past decade to describe proteasome inhibitors and immunomodulatory drugs that are now conventionally used for multiple myeloma. However, even newer agents in development will be considered truly novel when they hit the market, as they represent new...
The ASCO Cancer Research Committee recently convened four disease-specific working groups—in pancreas, breast, lung, and colon cancers—to “consider the design of future clinical trials that would produce results that are clinically meaningful to patients.” An ASCO perspective statement, reported in ...
There are few treatment options for breast cancer patients with progressive disease after two or more HER2-directed regimens for recurrent or metastatic disease. In the open-label phase III TH3RESA trial reported in The Lancet Oncology by Ian E. Krop, MD, PhD, of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute,...
Antibody-drug conjugates are being tested against several types of lymphomas and for some of these agents, “activity is quite impressive,” Andrew M. Evens, DO, MSc, reported at the recent Best of ASCO meeting in Chicago. Dr. Evens, Professor of Medicine, Chief, Division of Hematology/Oncology, and...
The R-CHOP regimen (rituximab [Rituxan] plus cyclophosphamide, doxorubicin, vincristine, and prednisone) was a major advance in treating diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, but experts are seeking to up the ante and identify ways to continue to improve outcomes beyond that achieved with R-CHOP. “We are...
The use of targeted therapies in indolent non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) is a burgeoning area. New targeted therapies directed at the cell surface, intracellular pathways, and the microenvironment are being studied for relapsed indolent NHL. These treatments, if validated in large randomized trials,...
Although various drugs have improved outcomes for metastatic colon cancer patients, researchers continually strive to find new agents to improve treatment. Antibody-drug conjugates are a promising option, due to the fact that they can deliver chemotherapy directly into a targeted cell, destroy...
Antibody-drug conjugates, checkpoint inhibitors, and single-dose intraoperative radiation therapy for breast cancer were included in the Cleveland Clinic's Ninth Annual Top 10 Medical Innovations List released earlier today. The list identifies those advances likely to have a major impact on...
Patients with pancreatic cancer may benefit from an investigational member of an emerging class of anticancer drugs called antibody-drug conjugates, according to preclinical results presented at the AACR-NCI-EORTC International Conference on Molecular Targets and Cancer Therapeutics, held October...
For women with metastatic, HER2-positive breast cancer, the amount of HER2 on their tumor might determine how much they benefit from T-DMI—also now known as ado-trastuzumab emtansine (Kadcyla)—according to data from a subanalysis of the phase III clinical trial that led the FDA to...
The antibody-drug conjugate DMUC5754A, a novel member of a relatively new class of drugs, showed activity in women with ovarian cancer, even those with hard-to-treat, platinum-resistant disease, in a phase I trial presented at the AACR Annual Meeting 2013, held in Washington, DC, April 6 to 10....