March 2019

The healthcare community is still awaiting a response from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to the opposition of the agency’s proposal to substantially revise the Medicare Part D protected drug classes.

In a review of over 300 hematopoietic cell transplantation cases, thrombotic microangiopathy occurred in as many as 36% of patients and significantly raised the risk of related death, according to findings reported at the 2019 Transplantation and Cellular Therapy Meetings.

Less than 20% of healthcare providers feel very comfortable administering and prescribing appropriate and timely treatment to manage adverse events associated with immuno-oncology therapy, according to an independent needs assessment conducted by the ACCC IO Institute.

The presence of comorbid conditions was associated with lower rates of clinical trial discussions between patients and their physicians, subsequently leading to decreased trial participation, according to an analysis performed by Southwest Oncology Group.

Overtreating men 70 years or older with prostate cancer cost Medicare more than $1.2 billion from 2004 to 2007, according to the results of a retrospective study using the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results–Medicare linked database.

Due to an active research landscape, the National Comprehensive Cancer Network Guidelines for non–small cell lung cancer have had 3 recent updates that include numerous clinically relevant recommendations.

In an interview with <em>Targeted Therapies in Oncology</em>, Michael Cusnir, MD, explained that Y-90 is a type of beta emitter that is extremely focused, which allows for the treatment to be localized without affecting healthy portions of the liver or other structures surrounding the liver; it is delivered to selectively embolize the liver.

Gareth Morgan, MD, PhD, presented the findings for the final analysis from the phase III TOURMALINE-MM3 trial at the 2019 Transplantation and Cellular Therapy Meetings, where there was&nbsp;a 28% reduction in the risk of progression and death in patients with newly diagnosed multiple myeloma.

Ongoing research seeks to boost objective response rates in urothelial cancer by developing biomarkers to predict which immune checkpoint inhibitors a patient is most likely to respond to and by testing these in combination with each other and other treatment types to increase both the number and duration of responses.

In his presentation at the 2019 Annual Practical Recommendations in Immuno and Molecular Oncology Meetingi, Sanjiv S. Agarwala, MD, reviewed survival statistics of patients with melanoma being treated at different stages of their disease.

Identifying the inflamed&nbsp;tumors that are most likely to respond favorably to immunotherapeutics and, conversely, finding ways to treat noninflamed tumors are essential for successful application of immunotherapy in endometrial cancer, according to a presentation at the 2019 Society of Gynecologic Oncology Annual Winter Meeting.