All Oncology News

Mutation discordance between primary and metastatic sites in colorectal cancer may occur more often than previously understood, opening the door for potential new therapeutic approaches to treating the disease.

The FDA has granted an accelerated approval olaratumab in combination with doxorubicin for the treatment of patients with advanced soft tissue sarcoma who are not good candidates for radiotherapy or surgery.

The correlation between tumor location and improved survival varies based on stage of disease in patients with metastatic colorectal cancer.

The PARP1/2 inhibitor niraparib significantly improved progression-free survival in patients with platinum-sensitive recurrent ovarian cancer.

An interim analysis of an ongoing study showed potential for reducing time and improving acceptance of testing and counseling for patients with ovarian cancer.

Abemaciclib plus tamoxifen, trastuzumab, or one of many endocrine-based therapies demonstrated significant antitumor activity and clinical benefit in patients with advanced breast cancer.

The addition of bevacizumab to neoadjuvant platinum-based chemotherapy led to a significantly increased rate of complete resection at interval debulking in advanced ovarian cancer.

The FDA has approved atezolizumab (Tecentriq) for the treatment of patients with metastatic non–small cell lung cancer who have progressed after a platinum-containing regimen and an FDA-approved targeted therapy for those patients harboring EGFR or ALK abnormalities.

The European Commission has approved pegylated liposomal irinotecan in combination with fluorouracil and leucovorin for patients with metastatic pancreatic adenocarcinoma following progression on a gemcitabine-based therapy.

Cabozantinib plus nivolumab demonstrated promising activity in the second-line setting and beyond at all dose levels tested in patients with advanced/refractory genitourinary cancers.

Surgical treatment of patients with non-muscle invasive bladder cancer can be considered a curative option, but the associated risk in comorbid patients is leading researchers to further explore the option of immunotherapy.

Immunotherapy is at the forefront of the burgeoning treatment landscape in renal cell carincoma, according to David McDermott, MD.

Men with bone-metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer appeared to derive additional benefits from treatment with radium-223 with concomitant bone-targeted therapies, according to data from an extended-access program.

The first trial evaluating the efficacy of abiraterone in patients with ovarian cancer has been halted early due to low response, according to results from the CORAL phase II trial, which were presented at the European Society for Medical Oncology Congress.

Jason Luke, MD, discusses some of the exciting research that is happening across the field of immunotherapy in melanoma, including combination strategies, novel agents, and next-generation diagnostics.

The field of sarcoma may have reached a turning point, according to Kiran K. Turaga, MD.

A final analysis of the overall survival data from the KEYNOTE-006 trial showed that frontline pembrolizumab was superior to ipilimumab in the treatment of patients with advanced melanoma.

The combination of custirsen with docetaxel failed to significantly extend overall survival compared with docetaxel alone as a second-line treatment for patients with non–small cell lung cancer.

The Final Rule from CMS on the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA) eases the pressure on small, rural practices to meet reporting and performance standards and explains more about the intentions behind the recently announced 2017 transition year.

The Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use has recommended approval of venetoclax for the treatment of patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia who have a 17p deletion (del[17p]) or TP53 mutation and are not good candidates for or have failed on a B-cell receptor pathway inhibitor. The potential indication would also be for patients who do not harbor the deletion or mutation but have progressed on both a BCR inhibitor and chemoimmunotherapy.

The Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use has recommended approval of nivolumab for the treatment of patients with relapsed/refractory classical Hodgkin lymphoma after autologous stem cell transplant and treatment with brentuximab vedotin.

In a propensity-matched analysis of a national cancer registry, patients who underwent radical cystectomy or concurrent chemoradiation to treat urothelial cancer demonstrated statistically similar median overall survival rates. Further analysis suggests that the hazard ratios between the two treatments change over time and is hypothesis generating.

Patients with large cell lymphomas have a standard approach of R-CHOP; however, those who fall under the activated B-cell-like (ABC) subtype are not likely to respond well to the regimen.

As the fields of renal cell carcinoma and bladder cancer continue to dramatically progress with the approval of novel agents—both immune-based and targeted therapies—oncologists need to improve their methods of selecting patients to receive such available therapies.

For patients who are likely to experience contiguous recurrence of glioblastoma, a new computer simulation using tumor treating fields and employing a personalized transducer array, delivered electric field intensities that exceeded therapeutic intensities in 3 different tumor locations. The findings may aid treatment planning when using the NovoTAL System, which optimizes therapeutic delivery in 2 orthogonal directions to the gross tumor volume and proximal peri-tumoral brain zone.

Increasing subsets of patients—both adult and pediatric—with acute lymphoblastic leukemia are being administered therapies designed to target their molecular subtypes, according to Elias Joseph Jabbour, MD.

Since the auspicious 2010 FDA approval of sipuleucel-T as the first immunotherapy vaccine for cancer, advancement with immunotherapy has been slow in the field of prostate cancer.

Ranee Mehra, MD, provides an overview of ALK inhibition in non–small cell lung cancer, an observation of the most common treatment-related adverse events, and what impact in-development agents will likely have on the expanding field.

To properly manage patients with DNA mismatch repair deficiency rectal cancer, one must have a well-rounded understanding of the molecular and clinical causes and risks associated with this subgroup of patients.

While tomosynthesis has been described by the oncology community as one of the biggest improvements in breast cancer screening, the technology that renders 3D-like images of the breast does carry limitations.