December 2 2018

To assist clinicians in the day-to-day management of their patients, the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer has developed its first guidelines to help direct immune checkpoint inhibitor treatment of NSCLC.

Adding aggressive, local radiation or surgery to frontline systemic therapy in patients with stage IV NSCLC whose disease has spread to a limited number of sites resulted in improved overall survival, according to findings presented by Daniel Gomez, MD, and colleagues at the 60th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Radiation Oncology in San Antonio, Texas.

The future of prostate cancer treatment will involve using biomarkers to identify which patients will respond to which medications and applying regimens currently in use for patients with advanced disease to men with earlier-stage disease, said Howard I. Scher, MD.

New draft guidelines from the FDA endorse the use of multiple expansion cohorts in first-in-human clinical trials as a means of speeding lifesaving medications to market, but the document warns that the difficulties and dangers of using such complex studies so early in the testing process necessitate unusually careful design and oversight.

Up to 30% of men with prostate cancer could meet criteria for genetic evaluation for hereditary disease. The hard part, Sanjeev Kaul, MD, said at the 2018 Large Urology Group Practice Association Annual Meeting, is separating the mutations that are relevant from those that are not.

Since 2016, the FDA has approved 5 immune checkpoint inhibitors to treat urologic cancers. Although that is unquestionably a good thing for patients, the rise of these agents means that the role of the urologist in cancer care is changing, said Noah M. Hahn, MD, during the 2018 Large Urology Group Practice Association Annual Meeting.

ASCO and SITC released a joint statement that outlines new recommendations for reporting data from immuno-oncology clinical trials.

Over the past 15 years, cancer therapy has been revolutionized through the development and use of antibodies that block T-cell inhibition via immune checkpoint, such as CTLA-4 and PD-1.

An initiative to streamline the way physicians document Medicare billing for patient evaluation and management was recently resolved and will take effect in the coming year as part of the calendar year 2019 Physician Fee Schedule final rule, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has announced.

In this editorial note from Arjun V. Balar, MD, he discusses how the KEYNOTE-57 findings have impacted the treatment landscape for Bacillus Calmette-Guérin—refractory, high-risk nonmuscle invasive bladder cancer.

Women who received 5 fractions of 28.5 Gy over 5 weeks experienced similar adverse events as women who received 50.0 Gy in 25 fractions over 5 weeks, according to findings presented by A. Murray Brunt, MB, BS.