June 2018

Things are looking up in the world of adjuvant therapy for patients with gastrointestinal cancers, according to Diane Reidy-Lagunes, MD. During her presentation, Reidy-Lagunes outlined the current state-of-the-art in GI cancer care, with findings from pivotal studies in gastric, pancreatic, biliary, and colorectal cancers.

Newer MRI techniques are being tested to improve the accuracy of prostate cancer diagnosis. Three presentations during the 2018 American Urological Association Annual Meeting discussed potential approaches to reduce the need for prostate biopsies for men with prostate cancer

Community-based cancer care continues to regress, with an 11.3% increase in the number of community cancer clinic closings since 2016, according to the 2018 Community Oncology Alliance Practice Impact Report, which was released during the 2018 Community Oncology Conference.

Multiple pivotal studies have led to CDK4/6 inhibitors such as ribociclib, abemaciclib, and palbociclib becoming the standard of care for women with metastatic ER-positive/HER2-negative breast cancer. Speaking at the 11th European Breast Cancer Conference in Barcelona, Spain, Nicholas C. Turner, MD, PhD, a consultant medical oncologist with The Royal Marsden Hospital NHS Trust, explained how tumors resist treatment with CDK4/6 inhibitors and how that resistance can be overcome.

Three presentations during the 2018 American Urological Association Annual Meeting in San Francisco, California, together demonstrated the potential and utility of different assays to identify prostate cancer and guide treatment decisions for patients with prostate cancer. Each assay suggested a simpler and more cost-effective tool for guiding decision making in prostate cancer than immediate tissue biopsy.

Urothelial cancer is a disease of older individuals, with a median age of 70, and comprises a population burdened with significant medical comorbidities. For those ineligible for cisplatin, the outcomes are undeniably poor, even with carboplatin. The advent of immunotherapy provided a very-well-tolerated option that could lead to durable remissions and, most importantly, expanded the treatable population with this disease.

Two selective inhibitors of the rearranged during transfection kinase have shown early efficacy in phase I studies of patients with various solid tumors harboring RET alterations, offering a potential new treatment option for patients with RET-altered tumors with reduced toxicity.

In a presentation during a controversy session at the 11th European Breast Cancer Conference, Angelo Di Leo, MD, PhD, explained where genomic signatures have shown the most benefit and potential ways forward to make recurrence scores a truly beneficial marker for clinicians to use.

Researchers’ understanding of why patients with cancer do or do not respond to treatment with immune checkpoint inhibition is constantly evolving, with new developments in innate and adaptive immunity, the tumor microenvironment, and more changing the way that immunotherapy is viewed and used. Many researchers are now pointing to the effect that gut microbiota have on patients’ response to checkpoint inhibitors and its implications for the treatment of patients receiving immunotherapy.

On May 18, 2018, the FDA released a safety alert concerning decreased survival observed in 2 separate ongoing first-line randomized clinical trials of checkpoint inhibitors in metastatic urothelial cancer for patients treated in the monotherapy arms with low PD-L1 expression compared with patients who received cisplatin- or carboplatin-based chemotherapy.