MINIMALLY INVASIVE radical hysterectomy for women with early-stage cervical cancer has been associated with reduced rates of disease-free and overall survival in the phase III LACC randomized noninferiority trial comparing minimally invasive and open abdominal radical hysterectomy. The results...
ON NOVEMBER 9, 2018, pembrolizumab (Keytruda) was granted accelerated approval for treatment of patients with hepatocellular carcinoma previously treated with sorafenib (Nexavar).1,2 Supporting Efficacy Data APPROVAL WAS BASED on durable responses in the phase II KEYNOTE-224 trial...
On November 21, 2018, venetoclax (Venclexta) was granted accelerated approval for use in combination with azacitidine or decitabine or low-dose cytarabine for the treatment of newly diagnosed acute myeloid leukemia (AML) in patients aged ≥ 75 years or who have comorbidities that preclude the use of ...
“I realized I just couldn’t wait for a new treatment option,” a determined Breelyn Wilky, MD, says, staring into the camera. “I had to find one.” If you missed the debut of the “Breakthroughs Save Lives” video during the 2018 ASCO Annual Meeting, look for it on television and online as part of a...
FOUR AND A HALF YEARS AGO, author Neil Canavan attended a scientific conference to learn what he could about the then-emerging field of immunotherapy for cancer. After a presentation by Zelig Eshhar, PhD, principal investigator in the Department of Immunology at the Weizmann Institute of Science...
ASCO is such a misnomer: the American Society of Clinical Oncology is far more than simply “American.” Over the past several years, I (a Canadian-born breast surgical oncologist, with an Indian-born mother and a Tanzanian-born father) have traveled to Zimbabwe, Bhutan, and the Philippines with this ...
HERE IS AN UPDATE on six different studies featured at the 2018 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting & Exposition. Topics focused on novel treatments for myelofibrosis, polycythemia vera and essential thrombocythemia, as well as systemic mastocytosis. Myelofibrosis ABSTRACT...
On November 2, 2018, lorlatinib (Lorbrena) was granted accelerated approval for the treatment of patients with ALK-positive metastatic non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) whose disease has progressed on crizotinib (Xalkori) and at least one other ALK inhibitor for metastatic disease or whose disease ...
HISTORICALLY, CLINICAL research has been viewed as an entity belonging to academic settings alone. With the advent of the Community Clinical Oncology Program (CCOP) in the 1980s and later with the Cancer Trials Support Unit, cancer clinical trials have begun to emerge in the community setting....
At the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) 2018 Congress, important studies were presented for every cancer type. Here, The ASCO Post offers some snapshots of lung cancer studies that may inform approaches to treating this common cancer, which—despite the advances in recent years—remains...
AS REPORTED in The New England Journal of Medicine by Scott J. Antonia, MD, PhD, of H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute, and colleagues, the phase III PACIFIC trial has shown significantly improved overall survival, a coprimary endpoint, with the programmed cell death ligand 1...
The ASCO Post is pleased to reproduce installments of the Art of Oncology as published previously in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. These articles focus on the experience of suffering from cancer or of caring for people diagnosed with cancer, and they include narratives, topical essays,...
The European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) 2018 Congress featured an assortment of study findings, many with far-reaching clinical implications for the treatment of patients with various cancers. Many of these trials were covered in-depth in recent issues of The ASCO Post. Here, we present...
For patients with advanced melanoma, the concept of treating to disease progression does not always apply. With many patients responding to checkpoint inhibition for years, when can treatment be safely discontinued? This important clinical question was addressed at the European Society for Medical...
TWO STUDIES recently reported in The New England Journal of Medicine indicate that minimally invasive radical hysterectomy is associated with poorer survival outcomes than open abdominal radical hysterectomy in women with early-stage cervical cancer. As reported by Pedro T. Ramirez, MD, of The...
The addition of pembrolizumab (Keytruda) to a chemoradiotherapy regimen yielded complete response rates of 85% in patients with human papillomavirus (HPV)-positive advanced squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck. These findings from a phase Ib study were presented at the 2018 Society for...
Although most major cancer organizations agree on the guidelines for prostate cancer screening, there is still uneven application of the test, such as in the older patient population, resulting in overdiagnosis and waste in an already fiscally challenged health-care system. Researchers from the...
As the number of opioid-related deaths continues to rise in the United States, stakeholders are struggling to make sense of the crisis. At the 2018 Palliative and Supportive Care in Oncology Symposium, two experts in the field, Charles F. von Gunten, MD, PhD, and Leslie J. Blackhall, MD,...
Immunotherapy has significantly improved the overall survival of patients with non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and is generally better tolerated than traditional chemotherapies, but the results of a retrospective study suggested that immunotherapy side effects may be more common than initially...
Does evidence of the effectiveness and safety of scalp cooling to reduce hair loss among women being treated for breast cancer mean that scalp cooling is a new standard of care? “I would suggest that it is,” stated Mikel Ross, MSN, RN, AGNP-BC, of the Breast Medicine Service, Memorial Sloan...
The Board of Directors of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) released an announcement expressing sadness upon the passing of former President George H.W. Bush, on November 30 at the age of 94. Once elected, President Bush appointed Bernadine Healy, MD, in 1991 to lead the National ...
Overall survival (OS) was improved across all subgroups of patients with non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) who received atezolizumab (Tecentriq) compared with chemotherapy, including poor prognostic factors that were evaluated in an analysis of data from the OAK trial. Additionally, this...
In patients with newly diagnosed multiple myeloma who are not eligible for stem cell transplantation, the addition of daratumumab (Darzalex) to lenalidomide (Revlimid) and dexamethasone significantly reduced the risk of death or disease progression by 44%, according to a late-breaking abstract...
As reported at the recent San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium and in The New England Journal of Medicine by von Minckwitz et al, an interim analysis of the phase III KATHERINE trial has shown that adjuvant trastuzumab emtansine (T-DM1; Kadcyla) improved invasive disease–free survival vs...
In patients with relapsed or refractory chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), fixed-duration venetoclax -(Venclexta) combined with rituximab (Rituxan) reduced the risk of disease progression or death compared with standard-of-care bendamustine/rituximab, according to longer-term follow-up of the...
As reported by Mamounas et al in The Lancet Oncology, the phase III NRG Oncology/NSABP B-42 trial has shown no disease-free survival benefit with 5 years of letrozole (Femara) vs placebo after 5 years of aromatase inhibitor–based therapy in women with hormone receptor–positive...
Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy is a revolutionary approach to treating hematologic malignancies. As experience with this strategy is gained, researchers are learning more about how to optimize responses, especially in patients with “immune exhaustion,” who have a suboptimal initial...
Commenting on the ibrutinib (Imbruvica)/chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell approach at a press conference, Joseph C. Alvarnas, MD, said: “Patients with CLL do not do as well on CAR T-cell therapy as those with B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia, and by combining ibrutinib with CAR T cells,...
Researchers are combining chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy with ibrutinib (Imbruvica) as a means of augmenting and deepening responses in patients with relapsed or refractory chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). Two pilot studies presented at the 2018 American Society of Hematology...
In the Clinic provides overviews of novel oncology agents, addressing indications, mechanisms of action, administration recommendations, safety profiles, and other essential information needed for the appropriate clinical use of these drugs. On November 26, 2018, larotrectinib (Vitrakvi) was...
The burden of mortality related to liver cancer is increasing worldwide. Prevention and control of viral hepatitis will be vital in combating this burden, but curbing the growing epidemic of obesity must also be seen as a key part of liver cancer prevention, according to Rosmawati Mohamed, MD, of...
One Friday afternoon in March 1999, Pat Glynn, an attorney and manager at the Department of Justice, called a colleague, Sharon Y. Eubanks, JD, to talk about a newly formed Tobacco Task Force. Full of enthusiasm, he described plans to bring a federal suit against the major tobacco companies on...
Two years ago, Rick Avila, MS, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Accumetra, LLC, was using rolls of Scotch tape as a research tool. The Scotch tape was a phantom, or reference object, and his company was working with computed tomography (CT) lung screening sites around the world to determine the...
Researchers recently discovered that by testing the level of nucleotide excision repair (NER) gene expression, pediatric oncologists may be able to determine the likelihood of early relapse (less than 3 years) in patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). These findings were published by...
In a phase III trial reported at the recent American Society of Hematology Annual Meeting & Exposition and in The New England Journal of Medicine by Woyach et al, ibrutinib (Imbruvica) and ibrutinib/rituximab (Rituxan) were associated with superior progression-free survival vs...
Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted accelerated approval to pembrolizumab (Keytruda) for adult and pediatric patients with recurrent locally advanced or metastatic Merkel cell carcinoma. The FDA’s approval was based on Cancer Immunotherapy Trials Network protocol 9...
Although parity—time since most recent birth— is recognized as a protective factor against breast cancer, an analysis of data from 15 prospective cohort studies to assess breast cancer risk in relation to recent childbirth has found that compared to women of the same age who had never...
“This study supports the use of neoadjuvant chemotherapy,” commented press conference moderator Carlos L. Arteaga, MD, of the Simmons Cancer Center at UTSouthwestern Medical Center in Dallas. “It did not matter whether patients received adjuvant therapy, as long as they had achieved a pathologic...
A large comprehensive patient-level meta-analysis showed that achieving pathologic complete response after neoadjuvant chemotherapy correlates with significantly improved event-free survival and overall survival in patients with localized breast cancer. These findings were particularly robust in...
First-line therapy with the combination of ibrutinib (Imbruvica) and rituximab (Rituxan) reduced disease progression by two-thirds compared with standard chemotherapy using fludarabine, cyclophosphamide, and rituximab (FCR) in younger patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), according to...
Commenting on the findings of the KATHERINE trial were Eric P. Winer, MD, Director of the Breast Oncology Program in the Susan F. Smith Center for Women’s Cancers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Thompson Senior Investigator in Breast Cancer Research andProfessor of Medicine at Harvard...
In patients with HER2-positive early breast cancer and residual disease after neoadjuvant chemotherapy, adjuvant treatment with trastuzumab emtansine (T-DM1; Kadcyla) reduced the risk of invasive disease by 50% over trastuzumab (Herceptin).1 The phase III KATHERINE study was presented at the 2018...
As reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology by Kater et al, high undetectable minimal residual disease (MRD) rates persisted after the end of venetoclax (Venclexta)/rituximab (Rituxan) treatment in the phase III MURANO trial in relapsed or refractory chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), and were ...
Patients with melanoma receiving proton pump inhibitors for comorbidities derived approximately half the clinical benefit from immunotherapy consisting of nivolumab (Opdivo) plus ipilimumab (Yervoy) as patients receiving the same combination but not treated with proton pump inhibitors, according to ...
First-line immunotherapy with durvalumab (Imfinzi) or the combination of durvalumab and tremelimumab does not improve overall survival in unselected patients with lung cancer, according to late-breaking results from the MYSTIC trial presented by Rizvi et al at the European Society for Medical...
Patients with previously treated, advanced non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) who received pembrolizumab (Keytruda) showed significantly longer overall survival (OS) compared to those treated with docetaxel, Herbst et al reported at the ESMO Immuno-Oncology Congress 2018 in Geneva,...
In the phase III KEYNOTE-040 trial reported in The Lancet, Cohen et al found that pembrolizumab (Keytruda) was associated with a “clinically meaningful prolongation of overall survival” vs investigator’s choice of standard therapies in patients with previously treated recurrent or ...
On December 14, 2018, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved romiplostim (Nplate) for pediatric patients at least 1 year old with immune thrombocytopenia for at least 6 months who have had an insufficient response to corticosteroids, immunoglobulins, or splenectomy. Approval was based ...
A seven-gene assay could improve care for patients with gastroesophageal cancer by predicting their likelihood of relapse after chemotherapy and surgery. These findings were published by Smyth et al in Annals of Oncology. A team at The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR), London, and The Royal...
A program that provided individually tailored lifestyle recommendations for patients undergoing screening for colorectal cancer helped encourage healthy behavior, according to results published by Knudsen et al in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention. “It is well known that...