As reported in The Lancet Oncology by Philippe Moreau, MD, and colleagues, an interim analysis of part 2 of the phase III CASSIOPEIA trial has shown significantly prolonged progression-free survival with maintenance daratumumab vs observation following induction and consolidation with or without...
A pilot program developed by researchers at Yale Cancer Center that offers patients next-day access for oncologic consultation showed reduced wait times for initial access to cancer care and increased patient satisfaction, according to a new report presented by Mougalian et al at the 2021 ASCO...
In the Japanese phase II/III JCOG0603 trial reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Kanemitsu et al found that the addition of adjuvant mFOLFOX6 (fluorouracil, leucovorin, and oxaliplatin) to hepatectomy improved disease-free survival in patients with liver-only metastatic colorectal cancer;...
Historically, rates of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) have been lower in rural areas than urban regions. However, a recent study published by Zhou et al in Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology shows that while cases of HCC have begun slowing in urban communities in the United States, the...
New research published by Shen et al in JNCCN—Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network has found that more than 80% of therapies tested in phase III oncology trials did not achieve meaningful clinical benefit in prolonging survival. The researchers analyzed 362 industry-sponsored phase...
On August 25, 2021, ivosidenib was approved for adults with previously treated, locally advanced or metastatic cholangiocarcinoma with an IDH1 mutation, as detected by a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved test.1 The FDA simultaneously approved the Oncomine Dx Target Test as a...
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), antibiotic resistance is one of the biggest threats to global health, food security, and development today. These highly resistant bacteria cause more than 750,000 deaths worldwide every year, a number that is predicted to rise dramatically....
With a population under half a million people, Brunei Darussalam is a small equatorial nation in Southeast Asia. Bordered by the South China Sea on the north, Brunei Darussalam is surrounded on all other sides by Malaysia, which separates the nation into two noncontiguous parts. Nearly two-thirds...
The ASCO Post is pleased to present the Hematology Expert Review, an ongoing feature that quizzes readers on issues in hematology. In this installment, Drs. Abutalib, Desai, and DeAngelis explore the treatment of older patients with primary central nervous system lymphoma (PCNSL), which pose...
Katherine Van Loon, MD, MPH, was raised in Miami, until the age of 12, and then her family relocated to Atlanta, where she spent her junior and high school years. “If you ask my parents about my decision to become a doctor, they will say I first declared it at age 5. Nobody knew how that idea came...
During the opening session of the 2021 ASCO Annual Meeting, Julio Frenk, MD, PhD, MPH, President of the University of Miami, gave a riveting presentation in which he described the devastating effects of the global COVID-19 pandemic on patients with cancer as well as on fragile and fragmented...
The OPTIMUM/MUKnine1 and FORTE2 updates were discussed at the 2021 ASCO Annual Meeting by Gordon Cook, MBChB, PhD, Clinical Director of the National Institute for Health Research In Vitro Diagnostics Cooperative and the Clinical Trials Unit in Hematology of the University of Leeds, United Kingdom....
Newly diagnosed patients with multiple myeloma deemed at high risk for disease progression may achieve sustained measurable residual disease (MRD) negativity with newer regimens and transplantation, and this may translate into longer progression-free survival. That’s the key take-away message from...
A novel combination of well-known drugs may prolong survival in patients with prostate cancer, according to late-breaking research presented at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress 2021. The PEACE-1 and STAMPEDE studies found that the addition of abiraterone acetate plus...
Oncologists who treat patients with melanoma will need to become familiar with another immunotherapy approach. For refractory metastatic disease, adoptive cell therapy is on the horizon. “Adoptive cell therapy will offer additional hope for our patients with melanoma. We’ll likely be seeing this...
As ASCO Annual Meeting attendees know by now, clinicians don’t have to be at McCormick Place to hear practice-changing findings and forward-looking advances in the field of oncology. Interesting content was no exception at the 2021 conference, so in addition to covering the biggest news from the...
The first randomized study in patients with malignant pheochromocytoma and paraganglioma has found that sunitinib prolongs progression-free survival by more than 5 months. The late-breaking results of the FIRSTMAPPP trial were presented by Eric Baudin, MD, PhD, and colleagues at the European...
Antibody-drug conjugates are improving outcomes of patients with lymphoma, often those who have exhausted treatment options after chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy. Four available antibody-drug conjugates are in the clinic, with brentuximab vedotin moving into the front-line...
The integration of radiation therapy into chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy may improve outcomes for patients with relapsed or refractory lymphoma, according to Charles A. Enke, MD, Professor and the Bill Bures and Jerry Pabst Chair in Radiation Oncology at the Fred and Pamela Buffett...
In relapsed or refractory B-cell lymphomas, bispecific T-cell engager antibodies are finding a place in the treatment algorithm, said Christopher Flowers, MD, MS, FASCO, Professor and Chair of the Department of Lymphoma/Myeloma at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston. At the...
In a phase III European Myeloma Network trial (EMN02/HOVON95) reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Sonneveld et al found that consolidation with bortezomib, lenalidomide, and dexamethasone (VRD) vs no consolidation followed by maintenance lenalidomide was associated with significantly...
Invited discussant of the two studies, Elena Élez, MD, PhD, of the Colon Cancer Program, Vall d’Hebron Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, Spain, discussed the challenge of treating BRAF-mutant colorectal cancer and what the new data bring to that effort. Dr. Élez noted: “BRAF V600E–mutant metastatic ...
The phase II ANCHOR CRC study, the largest prospective study of BRAF inhibitor–based therapy as first-line treatment of metastatic colorectal cancer, has met its primary endpoint, with 47.8% of patients with metastatic colorectal cancer responding to first-line treatment with encorafenib,...
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has amended the emergency use authorization (EUA) for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine to allow for the use of a single booster dose to be administered at least 6 months after completion of the primary series in individuals aged 65 years and older;...
On September 22, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved ruxolitinib (Jakafi), a JAK inhibitor, for the treatment of chronic graft-vs-host disease (GVHD) after failure of one or two lines of systemic therapy in adult and pediatric patients aged 12 years and older. REACH3 Efficacy was...
The randomized phase III controlled GETUG/AFU VESPER V05 trial was designed to compare the efficacy of two perioperative treatment regimens—gemcitabine/cisplatin or dose-dense methotrexate, vinblastine, doxorubicin, and cisplatin (dd-MVAC)—in patients with muscle-invasive bladder cancer. The...
As reported by Stephen J. Schuster, MD, and colleagues in The Lancet Oncology, long-term outcomes of the pivotal phase II JULIET trial showed overall and complete response rates of 53% and 39% in adult patients with relapsed or refractory aggressive B-cell lymphomas treated with the T-cell...
In the phase II SAFRON II study reported in JAMA Oncology, Shankar Siva, PhD, MBBS, FRANZCR, and colleagues found no significant differences in safety or efficacy between single-fraction vs multifraction stereotactic ablative body radiotherapy (SABR) for the treatment of pulmonary oligometastases. ...
In the phase II DESTINY-Lung01 trial, presented at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress 2021 (Abstract LBA45) and concurrently reported in The New England Journal of Medicine, Bob T. Li, MD, PhD, MPH, and colleagues found that fam-trastuzumab deruxtecan-nxki produced durable...
In the phase Ib COSMIC-021 trial reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Sumanta K. Pal, MD, FASCO, and colleagues found that the combination of cabozantinib and atezolizumab produced durable responses in patients with advanced renal cell carcinoma (RCC). Study Details One hundred and two...
On September 20, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted accelerated approval to tisotumab vedotin-tftv (Tivdak), a tissue factor–directed antibody and microtubule inhibitor conjugate, for adult patients with recurrent or metastatic cervical cancer who experienced disease progression on ...
In an analysis from a Blood or Marrow Transplant Survivor Study cohort reported in JAMA Oncology, Smita Bhatia, MD, MPH, and colleagues found that late mortality among patients undergoing allogeneic blood or marrow transplantation for hematologic malignancies has declined over the past 40 years,...
Dozens of oral chemotherapy drugs have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration over the past 2 decades and are now being prescribed in the treatment of many cancer types. However, most oral anticancer drug prescriptions require coordination between payers and providers, which can...
It has been well documented that a confluence of many factors, including low-socioeconomic status, contribute to health disparities and worse outcomes in minority patients with cancer. Strategies that partnered community-based health workers with low-income and minority patients with cancer...
Adjuvant pembrolizumab reduced the risk of disease recurrence in adults and children aged 12 years and older with high-risk stage II melanoma vs placebo, according to a late-breaking interim analysis of the phase III KEYNOTE-716 trial presented by Jason J. Luke, MD, and colleagues at the European...
In a phase I/II study reported in The Lancet, Hutchings et al found that the novel bispecific antibody epcoritamab produced high response rates in patients with relapsed or refractory B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Epcoritamab works by targeting CD3 and CD20 and inducing T-cell–mediated cytotoxic...
Fam-trastuzumab deruxtecan-nxki (T-DXd) showed statistically significant improvement in progression-free survival vs trastuzumab emtansine (T-DM1) in second-line treatment for HER2-positive unresectable or metastatic breast cancer, according to results from the global phase III DESTINY-Breast03...
In the primary analysis of the phase II DESTINY-Gastric02 trial, fam-trastuzumab deruxtecan-nxki (T-DXd) produced clinically meaningful and durable responses in Western patients with advanced HER2-positive gastric or gastroesophageal junction cancers whose disease had progressed after a...
Bintrafusp alfa, a first-in-class bifunctional fusion protein composed of the extracellular domain of the TGF-βRII receptor fused to a human IgG1 monoclonal antibody blocking PD-L1, showed long-term efficacy and a manageable safety profile in patients with pretreated, immune checkpoint...
In an ongoing phase II study, Aggarwal et al evaluated the efficacy of the ATR inhibitor ceralasertib alone and in combination with olaparib in patients with ARID1A-deficient and ARID1A-intact solid tumors. They observed antitumor activity with ceralasertib monotherapy in ARID1A-deficient solid...
New details about patients with cancer who have been infected with COVID-19 have emerged from the large observational OnCOVID study. According to data presented by Alessio Cortellini, MD, and colleagues at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress 2021 (Abstract 1560O_PR),...
On September 17, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved cabozantinib (Cabometyx) for the treatment of adult and pediatric patients aged 12 years and older with locally advanced or metastatic differentiated thyroid cancer that has progressed following prior vascular endothelial growth...
In advanced ovarian cancer, the duration of maintenance bevacizumab should remain 15 months, according to the European multicenter phase III ENGOT/GCIG trial. These results were presented during the 2021 ASCO Annual Meeting by Jacobus Pfisterer, MD, PhD, of the AGO Study Group and Gynecologic...
Sentinel lymph node biopsy “had similar diagnostic accuracy and prognostic ability as lymphadenectomy in patients with high-grade endometrial cancer at greatest risk for nodal metastases,” according to the SENTOR trial, a prospective cohort study of 156 patients with clinical stage I disease. Using ...
In the first report from the pivotal phase III KEYNOTE-775/Study 309 trial, the combination of lenvatinib, a multikinase inhibitor of VEGFR1, VEGFR2, and VEGFR3 kinases, and the PD-1 inhibitor pembrolizumab significantly improved multiple outcomes compared with standard single-agent chemotherapy in ...
Disease regression was observed in 82% of women with endometrial hyperplasia with atypia and 43% of women with endometrial cancer after treatment for 6 months with a hormonal intrauterine device, in a phase II study reported during the virtual edition of the Society of Gynecologic Oncology (SGO)...
The treatment of recurrent or metastatic cervical cancer has not changed much in recent years, but according to preliminary trials presented at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Virtual Congress 2020, checkpoint inhibitors and antibody-drug conjugates may become new options. In the...
In recent months, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved two treatment options for patients with endometrial cancer, which are summarized herein. Dostarlimab-gxly for dMMR Endometrial Cancer On April 22, 2021, the FDA granted accelerated approval to dostarlimab-gxly (Jemperli) for adult...
The PARP (poly [adp-ribose] polymerase) inhibitor niraparib is safe for long-term use and effective as maintenance treatment in patients with platinum-sensitive recurrent ovarian cancer, according to data presented by Ursula A. Matulonis, MD, at the Society of Gynecologic Oncology (SGO) 2021...
As reported in The Lancet Oncology by Andrés Poveda, MD, and colleagues, the phase III SOLO2/ENGOT-Ov21 trial has shown a large numeric but statistically nonsignificant improvement in the secondary endpoint of overall survival with olaparib tablet maintenance therapy vs placebo in patients with...