Clifford A. Hudis, MD, ASCO Chief Executive Officer, talks about extending the reach and impact of ASCO by partnering with patients who play a key role in advancing science through clinical trial participation. With near-record numbers of registered attendees, the 2023 Annual Meeting fostered new connections and plans for collaborations.
Omid Hamid, MD, of The Angeles Clinic & Research Institute, discusses study findings on fianlimab plus cemiplimab-rwlc, which showed clinical activity in patients with advanced melanoma, comparing favorably with other approved combinations of immune checkpoint inhibitors in the same clinical setting. This is the first indication that dual LAG-3 blockade may produce a high level of activity with significant overall response rate after adjuvant anti–PD-1 treatment. A phase III trial of this regimen in treatment-naive patients with advanced melanoma is ongoing (Abstract 9501).
Cathy Eng, MD, of Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, and Thejus Jayakrishnan, MD, of the Cleveland Clinic Taussig Cancer Institute, discuss significant differences in the citrate cycle, a core pathway of cellular metabolism associated with colorectal cancer. Metabolomic differences impacted by environmental exposures (arginine biosynthesis and dietary red meat) were also noted, suggesting possible links with younger age of onset in this disease (Abstract 3510).
James Chih-Hsin Yang, MD, PhD, of the National Taiwan University Hospital and National Taiwan University Cancer Center, discusses the latest data from the phase III KEYNOTE-789 study, which evaluated the efficacy and safety of pemetrexed plus platinum chemotherapy (carboplatin or cisplatin) with or without pembrolizumab in the treatment of adults with EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitor–resistant, EGFR–mutated, metastatic nonsquamous non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) (Abstract LBA9000).
Rana R. McKay, MD, of the University of California, San Diego, and Toni K. Choueiri, MD, of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, discuss results from the phase III CONTACT-03 study, showing that, for patients with metastatic renal cell carcinoma (RCC), adding the PD-L1 inhibitor atezolizumab to cabozantinib did not improve clinical outcomes compared with treatment with cabozantinib alone. In addition, higher toxicities were observed in the combination arm (Abstract LBA4500).
Carmen E. Guerra, MD, MSCE, of the University of Pennsylvania Abramson Cancer Center, discusses three key abstracts presented at ASCO: strategies to increase accrual of underrepresented populations in Alliance NCTN trials, how patient-clinician education can strengthen partnerships and improve diversity in breast and lung cancer trials, and mediators of racial and ethnic inequities in clinical trial participation among U.S. patients with cancer from 2011 to 2022 (Abstracts 6509, 6510, 6511).
