Circulating tumor DNA in the blood could serve as a marker of prognosis in patients with colon cancer receiving adjuvant oxaliplatin, according to a subanalysis of the IDEA trial, presented at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress 2019.1 After 2 years of adjuvant...
“The majority of breast cancers are hormone receptor–positive, and treatments that target the estrogen receptors are very effective, but they also cause havoc in many tissues that are dependent on estrogen for normal functioning. As a result, breast cancer survivors suffer from ongoing symptoms and ...
The term “relapsed/refractory multiple myeloma” is often used to describe advanced myeloma that has progressed through primary or salvage therapy. The International Myeloma Working Group (IMWG) defined the term in 2011 as disease that is “nonresponsive while on salvage therapy or progresses...
ASCO has updated a guideline on pharmacologic interventions for breast cancer risk reduction in postmenopausal women at increased risk of developing breast cancer.1 The original clinical practice recommendations for breast cancer risk reduction were published in 1999 and updated in 2002, 2009, and...
“There is no medicine like hope, no incentive so great, and no tonic so powerful as expectation of something tomorrow.” –Orison Swett Marden I was informed that my patient, a 58-year-old man recently diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and his wife were becoming impatient waiting for me in the exam...
For Her Royal Highness Princess Dina Mired of Jordan, ensuring that every patient with cancer receives high-quality care is not an abstract goal—it is personal. Princess Dina saw firsthand the life-and-death differences that access to state-of-the-art oncology care makes in a patient’s life when...
Question 1 Which of the following statements about cytokine-release syndrome and neurotoxicity after tisagenlecleucel infusion is correct? Correct answer: B. The median time to onset of cytokine-release syndrome is 3 days. Expert Perspective Following tisagenlecleucel infusion, cytokine-release...
OCE Insights is an occasional department developed for The ASCO Post by members of the Oncology Center of Excellence (OCE) at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). In this installment, Jennifer J. Gao, MD, Acting Associate Director of Education in the OCE, and Richard Pazdur, MD, Director of ...
Formal discussant of the CheckMate 227 trial, Sanjay Popat, FRCP, PhD, of the Royal Marsden Hospital, London, had some reservations about endorsing nivolumab/ipilimumab as a new standard of care, mainly related to toxicity. “The landscape of treating advanced non–small cell lung cancer has changed ...
The combination of nivolumab and ipilimumab improved overall survival compared with chemotherapy as first-line therapy for patients with advanced non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and programmed cell death ligand 1 (PD-L1) expression of at least 1%, according to the results of CheckMate 227....
A blood test could soon become a monitoring tool for the early detection of uveal melanoma. Stark et al discovered markers in the blood that can differentiate between a benign mole and a melanoma, while also determining whether the cancer has metastasized, according to findings they published in...
In a Canadian study reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, van Warmerdam et al found that mothers and siblings of children with cancer were significantly more likely to have mental health–related outpatient health-care contacts than their general population counterparts. The study involved...
In a study reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Osorio et al found that responses to programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1) inhibitor therapy tended to be consistent across metastases and occur simultaneously in metastatic lesions of non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and mismatch...
In a study in residents of rural southwest Virginia reported in the Journal of Oncology Practice, Virginia T. LeBaron, PhD, and colleagues found that most patients with cancer never received a prescription opioid medication, that few patients were admitted to hospital for opioid use disorders, and...
A phase Ib study evaluating the safety and long-term benefit of combination treatment with the BRAF inhibitor vemurafenib plus the MEK1 inhibitor cobimetinib in patients with advanced BRAF V600E–mutated melanoma has found that nearly 40% of the patients experienced extended survival of 4 to 5 years ...
As reported in The Lancet by Barbara Burtness, MD, and colleagues, the phase III KEYNOTE-048 trial has shown improved overall survival with first-line pembrolizumab plus chemotherapy vs cetuximab plus chemotherapy among patients with recurrent or metastatic squamous cell carcinoma of the head and...
On November 21, as part of Project Orbis—a collaboration with the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) and Health Canada—the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted supplemental approval to acalabrutinib (Calquence) for the treatment of adults with chronic lymphocytic leukemia...
Patients with advanced lung cancer can experience burdensome symptoms at the end of life. Pulmonologists can alleviate some of this suffering, but it’s a balancing act between doing too much and not enough, according to specialists who spoke at CHEST 2019, the annual meeting of the American College ...
Young male cancer survivors may significantly benefit from testosterone replacement therapy—especially after testicular cancer. Research published by Walsh et al in PLOS Medicine looked at one of the most common late-onset side effects experienced by young male survivors—reduced levels of the male...
In a phase II trial reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Toni K. Choueiri, MD, and colleagues found that the combination of atezolizumab and bevacizumab was active in metastatic renal cell carcinoma with variant histology and clear cell renal cell carcinoma with ≥ 20% sarcomatoid...
In an analysis of the German ALL-REZ BFM 2002 trial, reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Eckert et al found that postinduction minimal residual disease (MRD)-based treatment stratification resulted in “excellent survival” in pediatric patients with late relapse of B-cell precursor acute...
In a German study reported in a research letter in JAMA Internal Medicine, Jakob et al found that prescribed opioid use did not appear to increase risk of infection in hospitalized patients with cancer who developed treatment-associated neutropenia. According to the investigators, recent data have...
Endocrine therapy has been a lifesaver for women with estrogen receptor–positive breast cancer, but decreases in recurrence and cancer-related mortality have come with substantial side effects, according to data presented at the 2019 Supportive Care in Oncology Symposium.1 The results of a...
The ASCO Post’s Integrative Oncology series is intended to facilitate the availability of evidence-based information on integrative and complementary therapies sometimes used by patients with cancer. In this installment, Gary Deng, MD, PhD, and Jyothirmai Gubili, MS, focus on the herbal extract...
As reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology by Marabelle et al, the phase II KEYNOTE-158 trial has shown robust activity of pembrolizumab in patients with noncolorectal microsatellite instability–high (MSI-H)/mismatch repair–deficient (dMMR) solid tumors. Findings in the study supported the...
In a phase IIb study (STORM Part 2) reported in TheNew England Journal of Medicine, Ajai Chari, MD, of Tisch Cancer Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and colleagues found that oral selinexor and dexamethasone were active in some patients with multiple myeloma refractory to prior...
Immune-related colitis is the second most common toxicity associated with checkpoint inhibitors, affecting up to 40% of patients. The ASCO Post interviewed Yinghong Wang, MD, PhD, Director of Medication-Induced Colitis and Enteritis, Director of Fecal Microbiota Transplantation, and Associate...
In the COACH study, reported in JAMA Oncology, Supriya G. Mohile, MD, MS, and colleagues found that including geriatric assessment in oncology visits for older adults with advanced cancer improved patient and caregiver satisfaction with communication regarding aging-related concerns. Study Details...
In a phase Ib/II trial reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Laurie H. Sehn, MD, MPH, and colleagues found that the addition of polatuzumab vedotin to bendamustine/rituximab improved response rate and progression-free and overall survival among transplantation-ineligible patients with...
In a phase II trial reported in JAMA Oncology, Liu et al found evidence of the activity of combined nivolumab and bevacizumab in relapsed ovarian cancer, with activity appearing to be greater in platinum-sensitive disease. Study Details In the trial, 38 women with relapsed epithelial ovarian cancer ...
A novel treatment approach may help to alleviate one of the most common and debilitating symptoms associated with cancer and its treatments—fatigue. According to data presented at the 2019 Supportive Care in Oncology Symposium,1 the combination of short-course dexamethasone plus standardized...
For the treatment of BRAF V600-mutated advanced melanoma, we now have three BRAF/MEK inhibitor combinations that are approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration: dabrafenib/trametinib, vemurafenib/cobimetinib, and encorafenib/binimetinib. Although the toxicity profiles for these combinations ...
As reported in The New England Journal of Medicine by Caroline Robert, MD, PhD, of the Institut Gustave Roussy and Paris-Sud-Paris-Saclay University, Villejuif, and colleagues, the long-term follow-up of the phase III COMBI-d and COMBI-v trials has shown a pooled 5-year overall survival rate of 34% ...
As reported by Chawla et al in The Lancet Oncology, long-term data from the final analysis of an international phase II study suggest that a favorable risk-benefit ratio is maintained over time with denosumab treatment of patients with giant cell tumor of bone. Benefit of denosumab was indicated in ...
The ESMO Congress continues to grow as a pivotal platform for research in clinical oncology. At the ESMO Congress 2019, important findings were showcased in more than 2,200 studies, including 93 late-breaking abstracts. The ASCO Post summarized much of that news in separate articles over several...
In a late-breaking, oral presentation at the ESMO Congress 2019, Margaret von Mehren, MD, presented results from INVICTUS, a pivotal phase III clinical trial of ripretinib in patients with advanced gastrointestinal stromal tumor (GIST).1 Ripretinib is an investigational tyrosine kinase inhibitor...
For one of the rarest and most aggressive of tumors—cholangiocarcinoma—two novel molecularly targeted agents yielded encouraging outcomes in advanced disease in studies reported at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress 2019. In the phase III ClarIDHy trial, the risk of disease...
Treatment with the poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP) inhibitor olaparib delayed disease progression and appears to improve survival, compared with newer hormonal agents in men with pretreated metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer and homologous recombinant repair (HRR) genetic...
In studies reported at the ESMO Congress 2019, immunotherapy yielded encouraging outcomes in two gynecologic cancer populations in need of new treatments, including patients with advanced cervical cancer that is microsatellite-stable and patients previously treated for advanced endometrial cancer. ...
In a phase IIb study (STORM Part 2) reported in The New England Journal of Medicine, Ajai Chari, MD, of Tisch Cancer Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and colleagues found that oral selinexor and dexamethasone were active in some patients with multiple myeloma refractory to prior...
Data from a new study presented by Dang et al at The Liver Meeting (Abstract 40) found that patients with hepatitis C virus–related hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) who achieved sustained virologic response (denoting an undetectable level of the virus) with any oral direct-acting antiviral therapy...
Only about 6 in 10 patients with lung cancer in the United States receive the minimal lung cancer treatments recommended by National Comprehensive Cancer Network® (NCCN) Guidelines, according to new research published by Blom et al in the Annals of the American Thoracic Society. Erik F. Blom, MD,...
In a single-center phase II trial reported in JAMA Oncology, Andrea Cercek, MD, and colleagues found that hepatic arterial infusion of floxuridine in combination with systemic gemcitabine/oxaliplatin produced high response and disease control rates and was associated with promising overall survival ...
In a study reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Ness et al found a high rate of exercise intolerance among adult survivors of childhood cancer, irrespective of exposure to cardiotoxic treatment. Exercise intolerance was associated with poorer overall survival. The study involved 1,041...
In a phase III trial reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Sagar Lonial, MD, and colleagues found that lenalidomide significantly improved progression-free survival vs observation in patients with intermediate- or high-risk smoldering multiple myeloma. As noted by the investigators,...
Formal discussant of the CheckMate 227 trial, Sanjay Popat, FRCP, PhD, of the Royal Marsden Hospital, London, had some reservations about endorsing nivolumab/ipilimumab as a new standard of care, mainly related to toxicity. “The landscape of treating advanced non–small cell lung cancer has changed ...
The combination of nivolumab and ipilimumab improved overall survival compared with chemotherapy as first-line therapy for patients with advanced non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and programmed cell death ligand 1 (PD-L1) expression of at least 1%, according to the results of CheckMate 227....
At a press conference at the 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. Advances in the understanding of the...
The third-generation tyrosine kinase inhibitor 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 ...
Immunotherapy studies reported at the ESMO Congress 2019 yielded encouraging outcomes in patients with advanced cervical cancer that is microsatellite-stable and patients previously treated for advanced endometrial cancer. The combination of nivolumab and ipilimumab, with two different dosing...