Manish A. Shah, MD, of Weill Cornell Medical College, discusses phase III findings of the KEYNOTE-590 study, which shows that, after 5 years, the use of pembrolizumab plus chemotherapy improved survival with durable efficacy, compared with placebo plus chemotherapy, in patients with untreated advanced esophageal cancer (Abstract 250).
Michael K. Gibson, MD, PhD, of Vanderbilt University Medical Center, discusses phase III findings on chemotherapy plus camrelizumab in the ESCORT-NEO trial of patients with resectable esophageal squamous cell carcinoma; and phase III SKYSCRAPER-08 results on first-line tiragolumab plus atezolizumab and chemotherapy in the same patient population (Abstracts LBA244 and 245).
Dominik P. Modest, MD, of Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin, discusses phase III study findings showing sotorasib plus panitumumab vs trifluridine/tipiracil or regorafenib benefits patients with chemorefractory metastatic colorectal cancer in terms of improved clinical outcomes and better self-reported quality of life (Abstract 10).
Van K. Morris, MD, of The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, discusses phase II results on using circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) as a predictive biomarker of adjuvant chemotherapy in patients with stage II colon cancer. During the trial, no improvement in ctDNA clearance was observed after 6 months of chemotherapy following resection of disease. Dr. Morris notes that future trials should account for evolving assay performance in patients with colorectal cancer (Abstract 5).
Frank Kullmann, MD, of Germany’s Klinikum Weiden, discusses results from the ALPACA trial, which suggest a dose-reduced regimen with alternating cycles of gemcitabine/nab-paclitaxel and gemcitabine monotherapy after three induction cycles of standard gemcitabine/nab-paclitaxel is feasible and associated with an overall survival comparable to that with standard treatment, as well as improved tolerability (Abstract 605).
Ian Chau, MD, of The Royal Marsden Hospital, discusses reportedly the first study to evaluate the real-world effectiveness of nivolumab as a first-line treatment of advanced gastric, gastroesophageal junction, or esophageal adenocarcinoma. The combination therapy improved overall survival compared with chemotherapy alone. Dr. Chau presents the 18-month follow-up results (Abstract 295).
