ESMO Congress

A technically negative trial in high-risk adult soft tissue sarcoma nonetheless produced a significant survival benefit for anthracycline-based neoadjuvant chemotherapy, according to a study presented at the 2016 ESMO Congress.

Progression-free survival (PFS) was more than 3 times longer with ceritinib (Zykadia) than with chemotherapy, the current second-line standard, in patients with advanced <em>ALK</em>-positive non&ndash;small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) who progressed after first-line crizotinib.

Atezolizumab (Tecentriq) reduced the risk of death by 27% compared with docetaxel in patients with advanced non&ndash;small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) following the failure of platinum-based chemotherapy.

Lidija Kandolf Sekulovic, MD, PhD, associate professor of Dermatology, Military Medical Academy in Belgrade, Serbia, discusses a recently published survey during an interview at the 2016 ESMO Congress. The survey found that several thousand patients with metastatic melanoma in Europe do not have access to new, life-saving agents in this field.

Mark Kieran, MD, PhD, director, Pediatric Medical Neuro-Oncology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, discusses the results of a study that evaluated dabrafenib as a treatment for pediatric patients with BRAF V600-mutant relapsed or refractory low-grade gliomas during an interview at the 2016 ESMO Congress.

Single-agent pembrolizumab (Keytruda) reduced the risk of death by 40% and improved progression-free survival (PFS) by 4.3 months compared with doublet chemotherapy for untreated patients with advanced non&ndash;small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) with PD-L1 expression on &ge;50% of cells, according to findings from the phase III KEYNOTE-024 trial.

The oral multikinase inhibitor regorafenib (Stivarga) has the potential to become the standard of care as second-line treatment in patients with previously treated hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) who are unsuitable for loco-regional therapy and have progressed on sorafenib.

Gabriel Hortobagyi, MD, professor of Medicine, University of Texas, MD Anderson Cancer Center, discusses the major findings of the MONALEESA-2 study in advanced breast cancer, during an interview at the 2016 ESMO Congress.

Updated findings from the phase III EORTC 18071 trial show treatment with ipilimumab (Yervoy) reduced the risk of death by 28% versus placebo in patients with high-risk stage III melanoma.&nbsp;

Over one-fourth of patients with metastatic melanoma in Europe do not have access to groundbreaking therapies that could extend their lives, according to a survey presented at the 2016 ESMO Congress.

Mikhail Fedyanin, MD, medical oncologist, Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, Moscow, discusses some of the factors associated with discordance in mutation status in metastatic colorectal cancer during the 2016 ESMO Congress.

Harriet Kluger, MD, associate professor of medicine, Yale Cancer Center, discusses the toxicity profile of concurrent nivolumab and ipilimumab as seen in a phase I trial.

Sandra M. Swain, MD, Medical Director of the Washington Cancer Institute at MedStar Washington Hospital Center, discusses results and key takeaways from the final overall survival (OS) analysis of the CLEOPATRA study.

Patients with unresectable melanoma had a significant improvement in the odds of survival when treated in first line with a combination of BRAF and MEK inhibitors, as opposed to anti-BRAF monotherapy.

Emmanuel S. Antonarakis, MBBCh, assistant professor, Johns Hopkins Medicine, discusses the results of a trial that examined AR-V7 and resistance to enzalutamide and abiraterone in patients with prostate cancer.

Elizabeth Plimack, MD, MS, director, Genitourinary Clinical Research, Fox Chase Cancer Center, discusses a phase Ib study of pembrolizumab for the treatment of patients with bladder cancer.

All patients with metastatic colorectal cancer should undergo RAS mutation testing to ensure optimal patient selection for EGFR inhibitor therapy.

Patients with advanced lung cancer had improved appetite, less weight loss, and a significant increase in lean body mass when treated with a ghrelin agonist, two randomized trials showed.

Afatinib delayed disease progression for approximately one month longer than chemotherapy and helped prevent painful symptoms from worsening for patients with relapsed or metastatic head and neck squamous cell carcinoma.

Almost 60% of patients with advanced non–small cell lung cancer had tumor shrinkage when treated with the PD-L1 inhibitor pembrolizumab.

Treatment with nivolumab (Opdivo) demonstrated superior objective response rates (ORR) and longer durations of response compared with chemotherapy in a phase III trial of patients with previously treated advanced metastatic melanoma

Dual HER2 blockade with pertuzumab and trastuzumab plus chemotherapy for the treatment of HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer improved median overall survival (OS) by almost 16 months over standard first-line therapy.