Latest Conference Articles

Marc Ernstoff, MD, director of melanoma, Cleveland Clinic, discusses progression-free survival (PFS) and safety in patients with advanced melanoma (MEL) receiving nivolumab (NIVO) combined with ipilimumab (IPI).

Keith T. Flaherty, MD, Harvard Medical School and Center for Targeted Therapies at Massachusetts General Hospital, spoke to Targeted Oncology about the importance of combination BRAF/MEK inhibitors in the treatment of melanoma.

Janice M. Mehnert, MD, of the Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey, gave a presentation at the 2015 ASCO Annual Meeting entitled, “Should Comorbidities Be an Automatic Exclusion for Clinical Trials?”

At the ASCO 2015 Annual Meeting, F. Stephen Hodi, MD presented an analysis of the phase II CheckMate 069 trial covering objective response rate, progression-free survival, and safety in predefined subgroups, including those with poor prognostic factors.

Results presented at the 2015 ASCO Annual Meeting by Antoni Ribas, MD, PhD, examined the feasibility of combining these immunotherapy and targeted therapies in a phase I study.

Stefani Spranger, PhD, post-doctoral fellow, Department of Pathology, The University of Chicago Medicine, discusses the significance of melanoma intrinsic β-catenin signaling on immune exclusion and resistance to immunotherapies.

At the 2015 ASCO Annual Meeting, Adil I. Daud, MD, UCSF Hellen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, presented a pooled analysis of 655 patients with advanced melanoma enrolled in the KEYNOTE-001 trial.

Dr. Larkin presented updated results from coBRIM, including progression-free survival, response rate, and treatment outcomes of patients who harbored additional oncogenic mutations in their pretreatment tumor samples at the 2015 ASCO Annual Meeting.

Current trends and recent advances have reinforced the superiority of combined inhibition of BRAF/MEK in melanoma treatment, according to Michael A. Davies, MD, during a summary of studies in melanoma.

David Reardon, MD, clinical director, Center for Neuro-Oncology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and president, Society for Neuro-Oncology, discusses rindopepimut (CDX-110), a synthetic peptide vaccine, and its potential in brain cancer based on the results of the ReACT Trial.

The efficacy of radium-223 was not impacted by prior treatment with an androgen receptor inhibitor for men with bone metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer.

Christopher Filson, MD, urology, UCLA Medical Center, discusses a study that used a MR-US fusion biopsy in 1000 men as a method to diagnose high-grade prostate cancer.

The 1.8-mg/kg dose of polatuzumab vedotin is as effective as the 2.4-mg/kg dose on the endpoint of progression-free survival in patients with relapsed/refractory non-Hodgkin lymphoma while improving tolerability, according to a pooled analysis of phase I and phase II clinical studies.

Patients with anaplastic astrocytoma had similar survival when treated with either of two chemoradiation regimens, results of a randomized trial showed.

Tumor treating fields (TTFields) significantly and consistently prolonged both progression free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS) in a randomized, phase III trial of patients with glioblastoma.

Low-dose bevacizumab combined with lomustine has no significant effect on progression-free survival (PFS) or overall survival (OS) compared with standard-dose bevacizumab alone in patients with recurrent glioblastoma, according to results from a randomized phase II study.

A reanalysis of a phase III clinical trial in glioma patients confirms that there is no difference for a radiotherapy-first versus a chemotherapy-first strategy, but there is a major difference in long-term outcomes for molecular stratification independent of treatment.

David Carbone, MD, PhD, professor, internal medicine, College of Medicine Director, James Thoracic Center, James Cancer Hospital and Solove Research Institute at Ohio State University Medical Centerdiscusses the Checkmate 057 trial, which evaluates Opdivo (nivolumab) versus docetaxel in previously treated patients with advanced non-squamous non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

Study data reported at the 2015 ASCO Annual Meeting has demonstrated a nearly 20% response rate with the anti-programmed cell death-1 (PD-1) monoclonal antibody nivolumab (Opdivo) in patients with HCC.

An immunotherapy combination demonstrated an overall response rate of 27% in previously treated non–small cell lung cancer across a range of doses, according to results of an ongoing phase Ib study.

Patients with heavily pretreated colorectal cancer who harbored genetic defects in mismatch repair experienced high response rates when treated with the programmed cell death protein-1 inhibitor pembrolizumab (Keytruda), according to findings from an ongoing phase II study.

Targeted Oncology spoke with David Reardon, MD, clinical director, Center for Neuro-Oncology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, president of the Society for Neuro-Oncology, and lead author on the ReACT trial to better understand the significance of the study results for patients with glioblastoma.

Kurt Jaeckle, MD, professor of neurology and oncology, Mayo Clinic, discusses radiosurgery versus radiotherapy followed by whole brain radiation for brain metastases.

In the first phase III trial to show a benefit for adjuvant therapy in prostate cancer, treatment with an adjuvant combination of docetaxel, androgen deprivation therapy (ADT), and radiation therapy (RT) improved 4-year overall survival (OS) rates in patients with high-risk localized prostate cancer, when compared with ADT plus RT alone.

Patients with pretreated advanced ovarian cancer demonstrated encouraging signs of antitumor activity with monoclonal antibodies against programmed death-1 and its ligand PD-L1, according to findings from two clinical studies presented at the 2015 ASCO Annual Meeting.

Second-line treatment with trabectedin improved progression-free survival by 2.7 months compared with dacarbazine in patients with advanced soft tissue sarcoma following prior treatment with an anthracycline.

Lori J. Wirth, MD, hematology/oncology, Department of Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, discusses the SELECT trial, which examined the effect of age and lenvatinib treatment on overall survival (OS) for patients with 131I-refractory differentiated thyroid cancer.

Lenvatinib alone and in combination with everolimus significantly improved progression-free survival compared with everolimus alone in a phase II study of patients with metastatic renal cell carcinoma.

The combination of ibrutinib with bendamustin plus rituximab (BR) demonstrated a significant improvement in progression-free survival compared with BR alone in patients with pretreated chronic lymphocytic leukemia or small lymphocytic lymphoma.

Adjuvant whole brain radiation therapy dramatically increases incidence of cognitive decline without survival benefit in patients with small brain metastases from other tumor types.