February 2019

As the oncology care model, a 5-year pilot payment project from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services involving oncology practices, reaches its halfway mark, a fresh round of performance feedback intended to guide and evaluate its progress has been issued. Although many participants are critical of the structure of the OCM, they also acknowledge that important modifications have been made.

In a presentation during the 2nd Annual Precision Medicine Through Plasma: Using Liquid Biopsies in Contemporary Oncology Care symposium, Bob T. Li, MD, MPH, explained ctDNA’s growing importance in lung cancer, given the disease’s challenging prognosis.

Although immune checkpoint inhibition–related hepatotoxicity is a rare occurrence, it leads to ICI treatment discontinuation in more than two-thirds of affected patients, according to the results of a retrospective study presented at the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases’ 2018 Liver Meeting.

Despite encouraging results in other cancers, the use of immunotherapy to treat glioblastoma, which appeared promising in early-phase trials, has not panned out as well in larger, phase III trials. However, researchers continue to search and are optimistic about immunotherapy’s prospects.

Liquid biopsies have evolved beyond finding genotypes and have moved into the cancer detection and monitoring spaces, according to Geoffrey R. Oxnard, MD, medical oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

More men than women are dying from malignant melanoma, according to findings presented at the National Cancer Research Institute Cancer Conference held in Glasgow, United Kingdom.

Advances in checkpoint inhibitor therapy have gained speed in cancer care; however, ovarian cancer has yet to see any approved indications for immunotherapy agents, said Lana E. Kandalaft, PharmD, PhD, to an audience at the European Society for Medical Oncology 2018 Immuno-Oncology Congress.

Using regorafenib after hepatocellular carcinoma progression on sorafenib in the post–liver transplantation setting produced overall survival effects similar to those of patients without liver transplant, according to results presented at the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases’ 2018 Liver Meeting.

Targeted agents are routinely used to treat many cancers and have improved outcomes for patients with solid tumors and hematological malignancies alike. Recently, targeted therapies made their way into the armamentarium for acute myeloid leukemia, representing the first therapeutic advances for AML in decades.

A small subset of patients with colorectal cancer benefited from the combination of nivolumab (Opdivo) and pixatimod (PG545), according to early results from a phase Ib trial.