Vivek Subbiah, MD, of The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, talks about innovative design of clinical studies that may help demonstrate clinical benefit in precision medicine and advance treatment to deliver the right intervention to the right patient at the right time (Abstract DC06).
Iván Márquez-Rodas, MD, PhD, of Spain’s Hospital General Universitario Gregorio Marañón, discusses final results of the phase II SPOTLIGHT203 study of systemic pembrolizumab in combination with intratumoral BO-112 for patients with advanced melanoma refractory to anti–PD-1–based therapy. The regimen achieved an overall response rate of 25% and a disease control rate of 65% (Abstract CT014).
Nicolas Girard, MD, PhD, of the Institut Curie, discusses findings from the phase III CheckMate 816 trial, which is the first study with an immunotherapy-based combination to demonstrate improved event-free survival and pathologic complete response in the neoadjuvant setting for patients with resectable stage IB to IIIA non–small cell lung cancer. The results may benefit the 30% to 55% of patients whose cancer recurs after surgery (Abstract CT012).
Gautam Mehta, MD, of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, discusses how accelerated approval of potentially life-saving cancer therapies has been applied in precision oncology. Although “fast-tracking” drugs presents opportunities and challenges, one possible measure of the program’s success is the fact that, to date, no solid tumor accelerated-approval indications have been withdrawn (Abstract DC06).
Patricia M. LoRusso, DO, of the Yale University School of Medicine, discusses how patients may benefit in the coming decade from discoveries about agents that target KRAS, and how important the approval of sotorasib turned out to be, as well as other agents in the research pipeline. Dr. LoRusso also talks about the scientific advances in tackling inhibition (Abstract SY20).
Charles L. Sawyers, MD, of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, discusses the battle against treatment resistance and how to overcome it, as well as the power of observational clinical data in precision oncology, derived largely from his experience with Project GENIE, and the role of genetic ancestry (Abstract PL02).
