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).
Ian Chau, MD, of The Royal Marsden Hospital, discusses an analysis from the CheckMate 648 study on quality-adjusted time without symptoms and toxicity in patients with unresectable advanced esophageal squamous cell carcinoma. Patients treated with nivolumab plus ipilimumab and nivolumab plus chemotherapy compared with chemotherapy alone experienced longer quality-adjusted survival (Abstract 251).
Lorraine A. Chantrill, PhD, MBBS, of Australia’s Wollongong Hospital, New South Wales, discusses phase II findings on the combination of nab-paclitaxel plus carboplatin as a first-line treatment for patients with gastrointestinal neuroendocrine carcinomas. According to Dr. Chantrill, this regimen appears to be active in these tumors and warrants further evaluation in a phase III trial (Abstract 589).
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).
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).
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).
