Phoebe Starr
Authored Items
At the 2020 virtual American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) annual meeting, part I, a team of oncologists from different COVID-19 hotspots around the world gave a snapshot of wisdom gleaned from their experience thus far. Understanding of COVID-19 is rapidly evolving; the summaries below represent the experience as of late April 2020.
Read More ›No improvement in survival or in any key secondary end point was observed when the checkpoint inhibitor atezolizumab (Tecentriq) was added to enzalutamide (Xtandi) for the treatment of metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC) in the phase 3 IMbassador250 trial. The study results were presented at the 2020 American Association for Cancer Research virtual annual meeting.
Read More ›The addition of the checkpoint inhibitor atezolizumab (Tecentriq) to the 2 targeted therapies—the BRAF inhibitor vemurafenib (Zelboraf) and the MEK inhibitor cobimetinib (Cotellic)—improved progression-free survival (PFS) and the duration of responses compared with the 2 targeted therapies plus placebo in patients with newly diagnosed advanced melanoma and BRAF V600E/K mutation, according to the phase 3 IMspire150 clinical trial. The results were presented at the 2020 American Association for Cancer Research virtual annual meeting by lead investigator Grant A. McArthur, MB BS (Hons), PhD, FRACP, FAHMS, Head, Cancer Therapeutics Program, Cancer Research, Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, Melbourne, Australia.
Read More ›Combining the antibody drug conjugate, enfortumab vedotin (Padcev) with the immune checkpoint inhibitor pembrolizumab (Keytruda) showed encouraging results in patients with locally advanced or metastatic urothelial cancer who were unable to receive cisplatin-based chemotherapy in the first-line setting.
Read More ›Zanubrutinib (Brukinsa), a novel Bruton tyrosine kinase (BTK) inhibitor—which was approved by the FDA in November 2019 for the treatment of mantle-cell lymphoma—achieved high overall response rate (ORR) and durable responses in patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) or small lymphocytic lymphoma (SLL), including those with high-risk cytogenetics, according to findings presented at ASH 2019.
Read More ›In a phase 2 “basket” clinical trial, the combination of ipilimumab (Yervoy), a CTLA-4 inhibitor, and nivolumab (Opdivo), a PD-1 inhibitor, led to tumor shrinkage in 44% of patients with rare, aggressive, extrapancreatic high-grade neuroendocrine tumors (NETs), and the responses were durable. No responses were seen in low-grade tumors. These results come from the Dual Anti-CTLA-4 and Anti-PD-1 Blockade in Rare Tumors (DART) study, which was presented at the 2019 American Association for Cancer Research annual meeting, by Sandip P. Patel, MD, DART Clinical Study Chair, and Deputy Director, San Diego Center for Precision Immunotherapy, Moores Cancer Center, UC San Diego Health, La Jolla, CA.
Read More ›Reduced-dose chemotherapy is as effective as full-dose chemotherapy in frail elderly patients with advanced gastroesophageal cancer, according to results of the phase 3 GO2 clinical trial presented at the 2019 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting. Lower doses of oxaliplatin plus capecitabine (OCap) led to similar survival but improved quality of life compared with higher doses of that regimen in this patient population.
Read More ›Patients with metastatic urothelial cancer receive first-line treatment with platinum-based chemotherapy and second-line treatment with a checkpoint inhibitor. There is currently no approved third-line therapy for this malignancy. The investigational antibody-drug conjugate enfortumab vedotin may be a good choice for third-line therapy, based on the results of a phase 2 clinical trial presented at the 2019 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting.
Read More ›Gilteritinib (Xospata), a recently approved FLT3 inhibitor, prolonged survival in patients with relapsed or refractory acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and an FLT3 mutation in the phase 3 ADMIRAL clinical trial. A new analysis presented at ASCO 2019 was focused on the impact of baseline co-mutations and FLT3-ITD allelic burden on overall response and on overall survival (OS) in patients with relapsed or refractory AML who received treatment with gilteritinib.
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