Jingxuan Zhao, MPH, of the American Cancer Society, discusses study findings that showed worse long-term survival among low-income patients with cancer who live in states that have not expanded Medicaid eligibility (Abstract 6512).
Brian K. Link, MD, of the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine, reviews three abstracts on state-of-the-art therapies for mantle cell lymphoma: bendamustine, rituximab, lenalidomide and bortezomib; treatment patterns and outcomes for previously untreated patients; and venetoclax, lenalidomide, and rituximab in newly diagnosed disease (Abstracts 7503, 7504, and 7505).
Andrew Tutt, PhD, MBChB, of the Institute of Cancer Research, London, discusses findings from the phase III OlympiA trial, which showed that adjuvant olaparib, a PARP inhibitor, following adjuvant or neoadjuvant chemotherapy, may improve invasive disease–free survival in patients with germline BRCA-mutated and high-risk HER2-negative early breast cancer, which might lead to a new indication in this setting (Abstract LBA1).
Nadia Harbeck, MD, PhD, of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, discusses first phase III results from a prospective high-risk cohort of patients with luminal breast cancer, which showed a good prognosis in some women with more than four positive lymph nodes and low recurrence scores. The study also showed that a lower postendocrine Ki67 index and limited tumor burden may be promising criteria for chemotherapy de-escalation strategies, even in patients with high recurrence scores (Abstract 504).
Melinda L. Telli, MD, of Stanford University, discusses results of a phase II study on neoadjuvant talazoparib in germline BRCA1/2 mutation–positive, early HER2-negative breast cancer. In this setting, talazoparib monotherapy was active and yielded pathologic complete response rates comparable to those observed with combination anthracycline and taxane-based chemotherapy regimens (Abstract 505).
Thierry André, MD, of Hôpital Saint-Antoine, discusses final overall survival data for the phase III KEYNOTE-177 study, which confirmed pembrolizumab as a new standard of care for first-line treatment of patients with microsatellite instability–high/mismatch repair–deficient metastatic colorectal cancer (Abstract 3500).
