Articles

The combination of cabozantinib (Cabometyx), a kinase inhibitor, and atezolizumab (Tecentriq), a PD-L1 inhibitor, achieved clinically meaningful activity in patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC), including those with high-risk clinical features, according to the results of the phase 1b COSMIC-021 trial presented at the ASCO 2020 virtual annual meeting.

Early locoregional therapy with surgery and radiation does not improve overall survival (OS) in women with newly diagnosed stage IV breast cancer and an intact primary tumor compared with systemic therapy alone, according to the results of the randomized ECOG-ACRIN E2108 phase 3 clinical trial.

Pembrolizumab (Keytruda) in combination with chemotherapy demonstrated a statistically significant and clinically meaningful improvement in progression-free survival (PFS) compared with chemotherapy alone as a first-line treatment for patients with metasstatic triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) whose tumors express PD-L1.

Cellular therapy is becoming an attractive option for heavily pretreated patients with relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma.

There is a new standard of care in the first-line treatment setting for the subset of patients with advanced colorectal cancer (CRC) that is associated with microsatellite instability-high (MSI-H) or mismatch repair-deficient (dMMR), according to data presented at the ASCO 2020 virtual annual meeting.

The first-line immunotherapy combination of nivolumab (Opdivo) and low-dose ipilimumab (Yervoy) continues to show robust, durable clinical benefit, with a deepening of response, in patients with microsatellite instability high (MSI-H) or mismatch repair-deficient (dMMR) metastatic colorectal cancer (CRC), according to results presented at the ASCO 2020 virtual annual meeting.

Interim analysis of the phase 3 JAVELIN Bladder 100 clinical trial showed that maintenance therapy with the PD-L1 inhibitor avelumab (Bavencio) plus best supportive care significantly prolonged overall survival (OS) versus best supportive care alone in patients with advanced urothelial carcinoma whose disease did not progress with first-line platinum-based chemotherapy.

Targeted therapy with the Bruton tyrosine kinase (BTK) inhibitor acalabrutinib (Calquence), which is currently approved for the treatment of patients with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, has demonstrated durable remissions in treatment-naïve patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), according to the long-term data from the phase 2 CLL-001 study, which were presented at the ASCO 2020 virtual annual meeting.

“COVID-19 has been like a 9/11 moment in healthcare,” said Michael Kolodziej, MD, Senior Advisor, ADVI Health, at the Association for Value-Based Cancer Care (AVBCC) July 28, 2020, webcast. “We don’t have a playbook. It’s required us to rethink.”