July 2019, Vol 9, No 7

Since July 2016, more than 170 oncology practices across the United States have been participating in the Oncology Care Model (OCM), the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation (CMMI)’s 5-year pilot program designed to deliver higher quality, more coordinated oncology care at the same or lower cost. When practices elected to participate in the OCM, they knew they would eventually have to decide whether to accept 2-sided risk or leave the ­program if a performance-based payment (PBP) was not achieved. Read Article ›

The FDA has announced the launch of an oncology-specific pilot program for physicians and patients who need access to investigational therapies. The expanded access pilot program is a concierge service, said Richard Pazdur, MD, Director, FDA’s Oncology Center of Excellence, who spoke at a press conference at the 2019 American Society of Clinical Oncology Annual Meeting. Read Article ›

A growing number of targeted therapies and immunotherapies are now recommended in the updated National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) guideline for metastatic colo­rectal cancer (CRC). New first-line immunotherapy options for patients with mismatch repair deficiency (dMMR) and microsatellite instability-high (MSI-H) CRC are also listed in the new guideline. Read Article ›

The updated guideline on the management of metastatic ­renal-cell carcinoma (RCC) from the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN), version 3.2019, underwent a major shift in its risk categories to define preferred and alternative first-line treatments. Read Article ›

Formed 10 years ago with the Affordable Care Act, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) has been tasked with developing new payment and delivery models designed to improve the efficiency of specialty care. Among those specialty models is the Oncology Care Model, which aims to improve cancer care delivery by providing higher quality, more coordinated care to Medicare beneficiaries at the same or lower cost than under traditional fee-for-service structures. At the 2019 American Society of Clinical Oncology Annual Meeting, Lara M. Strawbridge, MPH, Director, Division of Ambulatory Payment Models, Patient Care Models Group, CMMI, shared recent data from the model, which began in 2016 and is scheduled to run through the middle of 2021. Read Article ›

Moving PD-1 or PD-L1 inhibitors to an early line of therapy, immediately after chemoradiation, has improved survival for patients with unresectable, stage III non–small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Read Article ›

The era of immunotherapy has opened new perspectives in renal-cell carcinoma (RCC), which is one of the tumors most highly infiltrated with CD T-cells and PD-1 expression, partially accounting for its sensitivity to immunotherapy. Other mechanisms to explain its sensitivity include myeloid infiltration, metabolic alterations, loss-of-function mutations, and human endogenous retroviruses. Read Article ›

Treatment with gilteritinib (Xospata) significantly improved overall survival (OS) with less toxicity compared with chemotherapy in patients with relapsed or refractory acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and FLT3 mutation, according to the final results of ADMIRAL, a phase 3 clinical trial presented at the 2019 American Association for Cancer Research meeting. Read Article ›

Immune checkpoint inhibitors represent a tremendous advance in the treatment of several types of cancers. Although approximately 20% to 25% of patients will have durable responses with these agents, it has been challenging to find biomarkers to identify who these patients are. Read Article ›

Preclinical and clinical data support the potential for the investigational novel tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI) infigratinib for the treatment of different FGFR-driven tumor types, according to Sameek Roychowdhury, MD, PhD, Associate Professor, Medical Oncology, the Ohio State University, Columbus, who presented a poster with the preclinical results at the 2019 American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) meeting. Read Article ›