Articles

An ongoing clinical trial of a novel strategy to evaluate new chemotherapy regimens for patients with early-stage breast cancer has identified another neoadjuvant combination therapy worthy of a phase 3 clinical trial involving patients with HER2-positive breast cancer.

The first liquid biopsy used to detect gene mutations that are associated with non–small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) was approved by the FDA. The cobas EGFR Mutation Test v2 (Roche Molecular Systems), a blood-based companion diagnostic for erlotinib (Tarceva), is indicated as an initial test to detect EGFR gene mutations in patients with NSCLC.

Tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) are the mainstay of therapy for patients with epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) mutation–positive non–small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC), according to the updated National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) NSCLC guideline. The NCCN guideline recommends EGFR testing as part of a broad molecular profiling in patients with NSCLC.

A “liquid biopsy” was able to detect 2 mutations in the ESR1 gene that predicted worse overall survival (OS) in women with estrogen receptor (ER)-positive metastatic breast cancer who were originally enrolled in the phase 3 BOLERO-2 clinical trial, according to results presented at the 2015 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.

Women with clinicopathologic high-risk breast cancer had nearly a 50% reduction in prescription chemotherapy, with no increased risk for metastatic recurrence when a cancer gene-based assay was used to guide treatment decision-­making, according to new data presented at the 2016 American Association for Cancer Research meeting.