Outlook in Treating Patients With Ovarian Cancer

Transcript:

Bradley J. Monk, MD, FACOG, FACS: I want to thank you guys for coming. I’m going to give each of you a chance to provide a summary about what you’re excited about in the next year of gynecologic oncology, and how that’s going to help you personalize treatment for your patients. I’m not going to focus on the past. We’ve done it. I want to focus on the future. Brian, what are you most excited about in the next year?

Brian M. Slomovitz, MD: I think when it comes to treating our patients, I’m really excited about what we can do to enhance the body’s immune system to fight off ovarian cancer. The nonspecific checkpoints aren’t, in my view, necessarily doing it. What can we do to combine the checkpoints with something else that’s going to really fight disease? Because we see it in other disease sets. The best way to fight cancer is to have the body’s own immune system go after it. So I think we’re close to getting some signals, and I think we’re going to find some out soon.

Bradley J. Monk, MD, FACOG, FACS: Thank you for that. Katie, what are you most excited about in the next year?

Kathleen N. Moore, MD: I have the opportunity to work with a lot of pharmaceutical companies and sort of see their pipelines and what’s coming. There are a lot of newly, really interesting assets. A lot of them target DNA damage response [DDR] pathways, which seems to be a very effective target for our patients. So I’m very excited about getting those into the clinic for patients who have seen PARP [poly ADP ribose polymerase] inhibitors and those who haven’t, to see if we can generate the next line of really transformative therapies for patients. I think that’s probably the bucket where that lives. And I’m excited to make sense of FORWARD I. Stay tuned.

Bradley J. Monk, MD, FACOG, FACS: Elena, what’s your excitement about in the coming year?

Elena S. Ratner, MD: I’m excited about today. I think the future is bright. I think just to even have this conversation and talk about these numbers…it’s not anything that we have been able to talk about previously. And I’m excited this year that all of us providers will take this responsibility to understand that we can no longer practice like it’s 2010. The landscape is different. We understand the biology of ovarian cancer differently. These tumors need to be studied and understood, maybe through a blood test, like you said, or maybe through old-fashioned tumor testing. Women truly need to get personalized care according to whatever targets they have, according to their life, according to their age, with salpingectomy, with different target approaches. This is not one-for-all like it used to be. Now women can truly get a personalized approach with better numbers, better survival, better lives.

Bradley J. Monk, MD, FACOG, FACS: So inspiring.

Elena S. Ratner, MD: Love it.

Bradley J. Monk, MD, FACOG, FACS: So Dr Slomovitz says the future is I/O [immuno-oncology]. Teach the body to actively cure the cancer. Dr Moore says DDR response. We’ve had this home run with PARP, and we’re going to get better. Dr Ratner says the future is now. The future is now, and she invites us to be open minded to change your mind. I love that. And I’m excited about the 3 phase III trials that we’re on the cusp of: PRIMA—all-comers, frontline; PAOLA-1—adding PARP to bevacizumab; and VELIA—adding PARP to chemotherapy.

So if there’s a unifying theme, the future is bright. This is because of your hard work, because of clinical trials, and the community that has come together to fight, as a team, to change people’s lives.

Thank you for your contributions to this discussion. On behalf of our panel, we thank you for joining us. We hope you found this OncLive Peer Exchange® discussion to be useful and informative. So long for now.

Transcript Edited for Clarity