Personalized Medicine

An assay that measures circulating tumor (ct) DNA in the urine can detect mutations in patients with a variety of advanced cancers, according to a recent study.

Boston, MA—Delivering the keynote lecture at the 2015 Palliative Care in Oncology Symposium, Howard L. McLeod, PharmD, Medical Director of the DeBartolo Family Personalized Medicine Institute at Moffitt Cancer Center, Tampa, FL, discussed advances in personalized medicine as they relate to palliative care, as well as the continuing challenges in cancer care.

San Antonio, TX—A genomic classifier is now available that can predict a low or high risk for metastasis in men with prostate cancer who have rising prostate-specific antigen (PSA) after a prostatectomy. The good news is that this test is reimbursable by Medicare.

San Francisco, CA—A new genetic test may allow clinicians to improve their therapy decisions by better categorizing patients into specific subtypes compared with conventional immunohistochemistry (IHC) and fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) subtyping. According to data presented at the 2015 Breast Cancer Symposium, the BluePrint 80-gene assay reclassifies approximately 23% of tumors, allowing for more effective therapy selection, particularly in patients with triple-positive (HER2-positive/hormone receptor–positive) disease.

Vienna, Austria—Results from a new study provide reassurance to women who have cancer while pregnant that they can safely receive treatment during the second or third trimester with chemotherapy or radiation without compromising their unborn child. The study showed that children born to mothers who receive chemotherapy or radiation during pregnancy had no impairment in general health, cognition, or cardiac function compared with children born to healthy mothers, said lead investigator Frédéric Amant, MD, PhD, Department of Gynecologic Oncology, University Hospitals Leuven, Belgium.

A study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention documented an average 38% colorectal cancer (CRC) screening rate among people aged 40 to 49 years, and a 69.7% rate in those aged ?50 years with a first-degree relative with CRC. An earlier analysis of National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) data from 2005 and 2010 showed that first-degree relatives of patients with CRC were 70% more likely to have a colonoscopy than their counterparts.

San Francisco, CA—Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) screening of women who are at average risk for breast cancer had a mean additional cancer diagnosis yield of 15.8 per 1000 patients, surpassing the yields for digital breast tomosynthesis and ultrasound in a new study. The results were presented at the 2015 Breast Cancer Symposium, by Christiane K. Kuhl, MD, Department of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology, RWTH Aachen University, Germany. This suggests that breast MRI screening alone every 3 years may be sufficient for women at average risk.

Vienna, Austria—Patients with advanced, pretreated renal-cell carcinoma (RCC) who have limited treatment options got good news from 2 important practice-changing trials, CheckMate 025 and METEOR, which were presented as late-breaking abstracts at the 2015 European Cancer Congress (ECC). CheckMate 025 showed a survival benefit for nivolumab (Opdivo) over standard therapy with everolimus (Afinitor) in patients with previously treated advanced RCC. This is the first trial to show a survival benefit for an immune checkpoint inhibitor after standard therapy has failed. METEOR showed that cabozantinib (Cometriq) nearly doubled progression-free survival (PFS) compared with standard everolimus in patients with advanced RCC whose disease progressed with previous vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) receptor (VEGFR)-targeted therapy.

“Everolimus is the first targeted agent to show robust antitumor activity with acceptable tolerability across a broad spectrum of NETs,” said James C. Yao, MD.

The treatment of patients with colorectal cancer (CRC) may benefit from immunotherapy with anti–PD-1 agents, based on results of a recent study using pembrolizumab (Keytruda).