Lakshmi Nayak, MD, of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, reviews two key abstracts on newly diagnosed primary central nervous system lymphoma and treatment with whole-brain radiotherapy, methotrexate, temozolomide, rituximab, procarbazine, vincristine, and cytarabine (Abstracts 2500 and 2501).
Sara A. Hurvitz, MD, of UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, summarizes four breast cancer studies: KATHERINE, on adjuvant trastuzumab vs trastuzumab in patients with residual invasive disease after neoadjuvant therapy for HER2-positive breast cancer; KAITLIN, on trastuzumab emtansine and pertuzumab vs trastuzumab, pertuzumab, and taxane after anthracyclines as adjuvant therapy for high-risk HER2-positive early breast cancer; TRAIN-2, on neoadjuvant chemotherapy with or without anthracyclines for HER2-positive disease; and PHERGain, on chemotherapy de-escalation using an FDG-PET/CT and pathologic response–adapted strategy in HER2-positive early breast cancer (Abstracts 500, 501, 502, and 503).
Christopher Nutting, MD, PhD, of the Royal Marsden Hospital and Institute of Cancer Research, discusses phase III results from the first study to demonstrate the functional benefit of swallow-sparing intensity-modulated radiotherapy in oro- and hypopharyngeal cancers (Abstract 6508).
David R. Wise, MD, PhD, of New York University Perlmutter Cancer Center, summarizes three important studies in prostate cancer: circulating tumor cell count as a prognostic marker of PSA response and progression in metastatic castration-sensitive disease; new phenotypic subtypes; and how circulating tumor DNA dynamics associate with treatment response and radiologic progression-free survival (Abstracts 5506, 5507, and 5508).
As Thomas Powles, MD, PhD, of Queen Mary University of London, prepares to deliver his late-breaking presentation at the ASCO20 Virtual Scientific Program (LBA-1), he talks with Christopher Sweeney, MBBS, of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, about current therapy: PD1/PDL1 inhibition in second-line treatment and as monotherapy in the first-line setting, as well as the concept of maintenance switch.
Michael J. Morris, MD, of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, discusses phase III data from the CONDOR trial, which showed that PSMA-targeted PET scans detected and localized occult disease in most men with biochemically recurrent prostate cancer presenting with negative or equivocal conventional imaging findings (Abstract 5501).
