February 2017

A new trend in the way pharmacy benefit managers are collecting fees from pharmacy providers is driving up drug costs, gouging point-of-sale pharmacy operations, and playing havoc with spending at Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

An investigational anti–B-cell maturation antigen chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy demonstrated an objective response rate of 78% in patients with relapsed/refractory multiple myeloma.

Preliminary results from an ongoing phase I study have revealed the potential of a novel small-molecule inhibitor in 3 combinations for patients with advanced cancers.

As immunotherapies become a greater part of the treatment paradigm of various cancers, researchers are spending more time developing ways to determine which patients will respond better to immunotherapy. Mutational load is one such biomarker that appears to have an impact on response to immunotherapy, particularly for checkpoint inhibitors.

The International Federation of Head and Neck Oncologic Societies recently completed its fourth tour, with 8 experts in the field of head and neck oncology traveling to 8 countries over a month to offer continuing medical education courses on treatment paradigms and surgical techniques in head and neck cancer across the world.

Following the approval of 2 immunotherapy agents, pembrolizumab and nivolumab for the treatment of patients with head and neck cancer over the last 6 months, immunotherapy is making its mark on the treatment paradigm for HNC.

Immunotherapy treatments for several tumor types has been developing steadily for years. However, the options for patients with bladder cancer have been limited until quite recently.

As the oncology community adapts to using immunotherapy agents more frequently in cancer treatments, the fear over immune-related adverse events (irAEs) prevents many clinicians from fully trusting immunotherapies.

Treatment with trastuzumab (Herceptin) has shown such a benefit in the treatment of patients with HER2-positive breast cancer that it is now the standard of care despite its association with cardiotoxicity. As such, researchers have taken to searching for ways to lessen or prevent the incidence of cardiac events in trials with trastuzumab.