Latest Conference Articles

Nivolumab continued to show high activity and a good safety profile after more than a year of follow-up in heavily pretreated patients with relapsed or refractory lymphoid malignancies or those with classical Hodgkin lymphoma.

The MATRIX regimen, comprised of a methotrexate/cytarabine backbone plus thiotepa and rituximab, improved outcomes in patients with primary CNS lymphoma.

TAK-659, an inhibitor of spleen tyrosine kinase, showed early signs of antitumor activity in patients with lymphoma, with two expansion arms planned for patients with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma and chronic lymphocytic leukemia.

Thomas S. Uldrick, MD, staff clinician, HIV and AIDS Malignancy Branch, Center for Cancer Research at the National Institutes of Health, discusses long-term data from a study examining rituximab plus liposomal doxorubicin in HIV-infected patients with Kaposi sarcoma (KS) herpes virus-associated multicentric Castleman disease.

Interim PET-CT scanning was successfully used to adapt treatment regimens in patients with advanced classical Hodgkin lymphoma.

Adrian Wiestner, MD, PhD, Senior Investigator, Laboratory of Lymphoid Malignancies, National Institutes of Health, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Services discusses the findings of the RESONATE II trial, which looked at chlorambucil versus ibrutinib as first-line therapy in patients older than 65 with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL).

The combination of lenvatinib and everolimus more than doubled progression-free survival and extended overall survival by 10.1 months compared with everolimus alone as a second-line treatment for patients with metastatic renal cell carcinoma.

Brian A. Van Tine, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor Department of Medicine Siteman Cancer Center, Washington University School of Medicine, discusses trabectedin (Yondelis) for the treatment of soft tissue sarcomas.

Progression-free survival in relapsed myeloma doubled among patients treated with carfilzomib, rather than bortezomib, in combination with dexamethasone, a randomized trial showed.

Adam M. Brufsky, MD, PhD, professor of Medicine, associate chief, Division of Hematology/Oncology, co-director, Comprehensive Breast Cancer Center, associate director, Clinical Investigation, University of Pittsburgh, compares the use of anastrozole to tamoxifen in patients with ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS).

Massimo Cristofanilli, MD, Jefferson University Physician, professor, director, Breast Care Center, discusses the PALOMA3 trial.

Monoclonal antibodies against PD-1 and PD-L1 have demonstrated encouraging signs of antitumor activity for patients with pretreated advanced ovarian cancer.

Trabectedin reduced the risk of disease progression by 45% versus dacarbazine in patients with advanced soft tissue sarcoma.

Howard Sandler, MD, MS, FASTRO, chair, Radiation Oncology, Ronald H. Bloom Family Chair in Cancer Therapeutics, discusses results from a phase III study on docetaxel with hormonal and radiation therapy in prostate cancer.

Mark A. Socinski, MD, professor of Medicine and Cardiothoracic Surgery, director, Lung Cancer Section, Division of Hematology/Oncology, clinical associate director, Lung SPORE, co-director, UPMC Lung Cancer Center of Excellence, co-leader, UPCI Lung Cancer Program, discusses a phase III study which examined nivolumab in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

Jedd Wolchok, MD, PhD, chief, melanoma and immunotherapeutics service and Lloyd J. Old Chair for clinical investigation at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, discusses the findings of the Phase III CheckMate-067 trial.

Treatment with neratinib immediately following adjuvant trastuzumab plus chemotherapy modestly improved invasive disease-free survival against placebo at the cost of low-grade diarrhea in almost all patients with HER2-positive early-stage breast cancer.

Alexander Spira, MD, PhD, FACP, medical oncology, hematology, Virginia Cancer Specialists, discusses the POPLAR study for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

Martin Reck, MD, PhD, Head of Thoracic Oncology, Hospital Grosshansdorf, discusses the maximum severity score (MSS) of baseline patient-reported Lung Cancer Symptom Scale (LCSS) as a prognostic and predictive factor for overall survival (OS) in the phase III SQUIRE study.

A landmark clinical trial that will channel patients into treatment arms based on molecular abnormalities rather than cancer types aims to test the efficacy of more than 20 drugs simultaneously in an ambitious National Cancer Institute plan to further propel oncology drug discovery into the precision medicine era.

At the 2015 ASCO Annual Meeting, the much heralded CancerLinQ big data system for helping oncologists more clearly understand treatment patterns and options was offered for demonstration in advance of its rollout.

Physicians will now have a new option for some patients who have run out of them, but whose tumors have a genomic variation matching a drug target that is FDA-approved for a different cancer.

Ben Creelan, MD, medical oncologist with Moffitt Cancer Center, discusses the results from a phase I study of MEDI4736, an anti-PD-L1 antibody in combination with gefitinib, an EGFR inhibitor, in patients with non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

In the phase III PALOMA-3 trial, adding palbociclib to standard fulvestrant more than doubled progression-free survival in pretreated patients with HR-positive, HER2-negative breast cancer.

Treatment with eribulin (Halaven) improved overall survival by 2 months compared with dacarbazine in patients with advanced leiomyosarcoma and adipocytic sarcoma.

Over the past 30 years, survivors of childhood cancers have become less likely to die of illnesses caused by their treatment, such as new malignancies or cardiac or lung disease.

Elective neck dissection performed at the same time patients have surgery for early-stage, node-negative, oral squamous cell cancer significantly improved overall survival and reduced the risk of death and recurrence when compared with a watchful waiting approach.

Patients with small brain metastases from other tumor types should not routinely receive adjuvant whole brain radiation therapy (WBRT), according to a study that showed the treatment dramatically increases the incidence of cognitive decline without improving survival outcomes.

Novel targeted therapies against ALK, BRAF, and RET have demonstrated promising outcomes in molecularly-defined patients with non-small cell lung cancer.

Frontline nivolumab as monotherapy and in combination with ipilimumab more than doubled progression-free survival versus ipilimumab alone in patients with advanced melanoma.