Head & Neck Cancers

Although the ability to treat head and neck cancer has certainly improved over the years, a significant percentage of patients experience recurrent disease after initial treatment.

January 8th, 2021 - The United Kingdom’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence has issued guidelines recommending against nivolumab for use in patients with recurrent or metastatic head and neck squamous cell carcinoma who experienced disease progression during or after platinum-based chemotherapy.

December 23, 2020 — Although SGX942 was found to induce clinically meaningful reductions in severe oral mucositis vs placebo in patients with head and neck cancer, the benefit failed to reach statistical significance, thus missing the primary end point of the phase 3 DOM-INNATE study.

December 21, 2020 - Cabozantinib was found to significantly improve progression-free survival compared with placebo in patients with dedifferentiated thyroid cancer who are refractory to radioiodine and have progressed following up to 2 prior VEGF-targeted treatments.

December 1, 2020 - The FDA has approved pralsetinib for the treatment of select patients with advanced or metastatic RET-mutant medullary thyroid cancer who require systemic therapy or RET fusion-positive thyroid cancer who require systemic therapy and who are radioactive iodine-refractory.

November 13, 2020 - Treatment with the combination of eganelisib, a selective PI3K-γ inhibitor, and nivolumab demonstrated encouraging clinical activity and a favorable safety profile in patients with head and neck squamous cell carcinoma.

November 13, 2020 - ALX148 showcased favorable safety and elicited objective responses when combined with trastuzumab, pembrolizumab, and multiagent chemotherapy regimens in patients with gastric/gastroesophageal junction cancer and head and neck squamous cell carcinoma.

Nabil F. Saba, MD, FACP, discusses ongoing clinical trials in head and neck cancer.

Alan L. Ho, MD, PhD, highlights the great strides that have been made with head and neck cancer, including those with rarer diseases like thyroid cancer and salivary gland cancers, due to a greater understanding of disease biology and genomics.

The investigational small molecule, γ-secretase inhibitor AL101 monotherapy was found to elicit deep responses with a significant disease control rate in patients with recurrent or metastatic adenoid cystic carcinoma harboring NOTCH activating mutations.

Investigators are testing tipifarnib, a novel drug that inhibits a critical enzyme needed for HRAS activation, in patients with head and neck squamous cell carcinoma whose tumors harbor the mutation.

Heavily pretreated patients with unresectable recurrent or metastatic head and neck squamous cancer experienced an improvement in survival following treatment with axitinib.

Ezra Cohen, MD, FRCPSC, FASCO, discusses the design of the phase 2 SPEARHEAD-2 trial with ADP-A2M4 plus pembrolizumab in patients with recurrent or metastatic head and neck cancer.

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has launched the Center for Salivary and Rare Head and Neck Cancers to treat patients with rare and occasionally aggressive cancers arising from the head and neck.

Yale Cancer Center researchers were awarded a five-year, $11.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to fund the Yale Head and Neck Cancer Specialized Program of Research Excellence.

Potent and durable clinical activity was shown with pralsetinib as treatment of patients with RET-mutant advanced medullary thyroid cancer, regardless of the line of therapy.

Three-year follow-up data for the phase 2 study of the first-in-class inhibitor of apoptosis protein antagonist, xevinapant, in combination with standard cisplatin-based concomitant fractionation chemoradiation therapy reduced the risk of mortality by half compared with CRT alone in patients with locally advanced squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck.

The FDA has granted pralsetinib a priority review for the treatment of patients with advanced or metastatic RET-mutant medullary thyroid cancer and RET fusion–positive thyroid cancer.