Articles

Hollywood, FL—Pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) will soon have the new challenge of dealing with the confusion of biosimilars, according to Douglas S. Burgoyne, PharmD, President and Managing Partner, VRx Pharmacy Services, Salt Lake City, UT, a full-service PBM company that provides medication therapy management, case management, and other clinical services to employer group waiver plans and commercial payers.

A new study investigated whether combined immune blockade with ipilimumab and nivolumab would increase survival in patients with advanced melanoma (Wolchok JD, et al. N Engl J Med. 2013;369:122-133).

A new phase 2 clinical trial is one of the first to investigate the use of hormonal therapy without chemotherapy as a neoadjuvant strategy for patients with HER2-positive breast cancer (Rimawi MF, et al. J Clin Oncol. 2013;31:1726-1731).

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the tyrosine kinase inhibitor afatinib (Gilotrif; Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals) for the treatment of patients with metastatic non–small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) who have the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) gene mutations exon 19 deletions or exon 21 L858R substitution.

At the Third Annual Conference of the Association for Value-Based Cancer Care, several Meet the Experts roundtable discussions addressed the hottest topics in oncology. James T. Kenney, Jr, RPh, MBA, Pharmacy Operations Manager at Harvard Pilgrim, and Douglas S. Burgoyne, PharmD, President and Managing Partner, VRx Pharmacy Services, discussed the topic of brown and white bagging at one of these sessions.

Hollywood, FL—With the Affordable Care Act about to be fully enacted, and growing concerns about managing oncology costs, health plans will put simple processes in place ahead of new drug approvals to more actively manage these medications, said James T. Kenney, Jr, RPh, MBA, Pharmacy Operations Manager, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Wellesley, MA, at the Third Annual Conference of the Association for Value-Based Cancer Care.

Hollywood, FL—In response to mandates for more efficient and lower-cost cancer drug utilization, CVS Caremark is developing innovative strategies, said Kirby J. Eng, RPh, Director of On­co­logy Medical Pharmacy Manage­ment, CVS Caremark, at the Third Annual Conference of the Association for Value-Based Cancer Care.

Orlando, FL—In screening colonoscopies, high adenoma detection rates (ADRs) by physicians are associated with fewer missed cancers and with better survival from colorectal cancer (CRC), according to 2 studies presented at Digestive Disease Week 2013.

Chicago, IL—For-profit hospitals are more likely than their nonprofit counterparts to treat elderly patients with breast cancer with an expensive form of radiotherapy—despite lacking evidence of its benefit, researchers from the Yale Cancer Outcomes, Public Policy and Effectiveness Research Center reported at the 2013 American Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting.