Articles

New York, NY—Patients with cancer are not just faced with a terrifying disease; they must also surmount an uphill climb when it comes to accessing care. Advocates—some of whom have shared in their experiences as patients—are hard at work to ensure access is a reality. A roundtable discussion of patient advocates at the 2019 AVBCC Summit focused on identifying the major obstacles to care and what can be done to improve patient access.

Data from the single-arm, open-label phase 2 clinical trial FIGHT-202, which was presented at the ESMO Congress 2019, revealed that investigational pemigatinib induced a response in 35.5% of the 107 patients with FGFR2 fusions or rearrangements (cohort A), with a median duration of response of 7.5 months.

Barcelona, Spain—Ivosidenib (Tib­sovo), an oral therapy that targets isocitrate dehydrogenase-1 (IDH1) mutation, significantly improved progression-free survival (PFS) in patients with advanced cholangiocarcinoma (CCA) and an IDH1 mutation, in a phase 3 clinical trial reported lead investigator Ghassan K. Abou-Alfa, MD, Medical Oncologist, Gastrointestinal Oncology Service, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York City, at the ESMO Congress 2019.

San Francisco, CA—Cannabis has been credited as a medicinal plant with benefits ranging from pain and inflammation relief to epileptic seizure reduction to insomnia and anxiety cures, but the evidence is still limited, particularly in the setting of advanced cancer.

San Francisco, CA—There is no shortage of research on psychosocial issues in patients with cancer, but implementation of this evidence in clinical practice has a long way to go, according to data presented at the 2019 Supportive Care in Oncology Symposium.

Barcelona, Spain—The immunotherapy combination of nivolumab (Opdivo) plus ipilimumab (Yervoy) improved overall survival (OS) compared with chemotherapy as first-line treatment in patients with advanced non–small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and PD-L1 expression ≥1%, according to results of CheckMate 227.

Barcelona, Spain—Osimertinib (Tagrisso), a third-generation EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI), extended overall survival (OS) compared with older TKI EGFR inhibitors, including gefitinib (Iressa) or erlotinib (Tarceva), as first-line treatment for patients with advanced non–small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and EGFR mutation in the phase 3 clinical trial called FLAURA.

On October 23, 2019, the FDA approved a new indication for the PARP inhibitor niraparib (Zejula; Tesaro) for the treatment of patients with homologous recombination deficiency repair (HRD)-positive advanced ovarian, fallopian tube, or primary peritoneal cancer, after receiving ≥3 chemotherapy regimens.

On November 21, 2019, the FDA accelerated the approval of acalabrutinib (Calquence; AstraZeneca) for adults with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) or with small lymphocytic lymphoma. This drug was approved 4 months earlier than the FDA PDUFA date.

On December 3, 2019, the FDA approved atezolizumab (Tecentriq; Genentech), in combination with paclitaxel protein-bound (Abraxane) and carboplatin chemotherapy, for the first-line treatment of adults with metastatic nonsquamous non–small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) that does not harbor EGFR or ALK genomic mutations.