Articles

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.

In October, the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) released its first set of “flash cards” or “Evidence Blocks” as a tool for evaluating treatment decisions, seeking to solve a drug cost problem that does not exist, by adding to a problem that does: insurers shifting the cost of cancer treatment to patients. In so doing, the NCCN could inadvertently increase the rate at which patients with cancer choose assisted suicide.

To take full benefit of advances made possible by Next-Generation Sequencing, more American patients with cancer must be involved in clinical trials, said Raju Kucherlapati, PhD, Professor of Genetics, Harvard Medical School, at the Fifth Annual Conference of the Association for Value-Based Cancer Care.

“Especially for average-risk women, decisions to undergo regular mammography screening must also consider the harms of mammography,” stated Nancy L. Keating, MD, MPH, and Lydia E. Pace, MD, MPH.

“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 National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) has added a new value criterion to its clinical practice guidelines in the form of “Evidence Blocks” for the evaluation of treatment options.

Washington, DC—Complex partnerships among cancer care stakeholders, including drug manufacturers, are becoming the norm.

Copenhagen, Denmark—Current follow-up strategy for patients with prostate cancer was found to be the least cost-effective approach in an analysis conducted in Europe.