Articles

A study of state-specific costs of care and survival among Medicare beneficiaries with myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) shows no correlation between the cost of care and patient outcomes.

The job of the oncology medical team is to put out the fire, stop the emergency, and save the patient’s life, said Diane Heditsian, Researcher and Patient Advocate, Breast Oncology Program, University of California, San Francisco, during the 2016 Cancer Survivorship Symposium.

On January 16, 2016, President Barack Obama promised a “moonshot” to accelerate national progress to combat cancer, but delivering on that promise faces many challenges.

Society meetings, such as the recent American Society of Hematology (ASH) annual meeting, generate a lot of clinical-related excitement regarding new treatment options, protocols, and pathways for hematologic cancers.

The use of therapy with chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-modified T-cells consistently demonstrated activity in advanced hematologic malignancies, including different types of lymphoma, in multiple trials reported at ASH 2015.

The oral, investigational, small-molecule BCL-2 inhibitor venetoclax has shown excellent and durable responses in patients with relapsed or refractory chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). All patients in the trial harbored the 17p deletion (del 17p), which signals poor prognosis.

Immunotherapy is generating great excitement in melanoma and non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC). The FDA approvals of checkpoint inhibitors in these tumor types, as well as encouraging preliminary results in other solid tumors, have paved the way for studying these therapies in hematologic cancers.

Treatment with CD19-targeted immunotherapy blinatumomab (Blincyto) as a single agent showed antileukemic activity in patients with minimal residual disease (MRD) Philadelphia chromosome (Ph)-positive B-cell precursor acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) whose disease progressed after or was intolerant to a second-generation or later tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI). The results were presented at ASH 2015.

Ibrutinib (Imbruvica) significantly reduced the risk for disease progression or death compared with standard treatment with chlorambucil (Leukeran) in older (aged ≥65 years) treatment-naive patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). Ibrutinib achieved a 91% reduction in the risk for disease progression and an 84% reduction in the risk for death compared with chlorambucil.

Idelalisib (Zydelig) reduced the risk for disease progression and death when added to bendamustine (Treanda) plus rituximab (Rituxan) versus bendamustine plus rituximab alone in patients with relapsed or refractory chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), according to the results of a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, phase 3 late-breaking trial presented at ASH 2015.