Advances in the Treatment of Sarcomas

Lisa B. Ercolano, MD, orthopedic oncologist and chief of musculoskeletal oncology at Allegheny Health Network, discusses some of the advances that have been seen in the treatment of sarcomas.

Over the past few years, there has been an increase in the number of therapies available for the treatment of patients with sarcoma. Some of these recent advances include CDK4 inhibitors and MDM2 inhibitors for patients with liposarcomas and desmoid sarcomas, gamma secretase inhibitors for patients with Kaposi sarcoma, and FGFR and IDH mutations as potential targets in some forms of soft tissue and bone sarcomas.

Therapies continue to be investigated, including regorafenib (Stivarga), entrectinib (Rozlytrek), and larotrectinib (Vitrakvi), as well as additional therapies, such as cabozantinib (Cabometyx) and immunotherapies, are being explored for the treatment of sarcomas.

However, with these advances, challenges and unmet needs remain in this space. According to Ercolano, while slight improvements in survival have been observed with different types of therapies, like pembrolizumab (Keytruda} or trabectedin (Yondelis), survival rates have only improved by months rather than years. Because of this, experts continue to evaluate new treatment options to improve outcomes for this patient population.

Transcription:

0:10 | There have been a number of drugs, even ones that are used in other cancers that you have probably heard of, like [pembrolizumab] or trabectedin, some of these multiple tyrosine kinase inhibitors, and then immunotherapy drugs. There are a number of them that have been developed and when we identify that they target a mutation in a patient's tumor, we have those as options.

0:39 | The problem again is that we are not seeing years and years of improved survival. We are seeing maybe like months, which as you know, we want more and we want better outcomes than that, obviously. So we are improving, but we are lagging.