ASCO 2015 Highlights

Chicago, IL—Abiraterone acetate (Zytiga) delays disease progression when used with prednisone before chemotherapy in men with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer, said Charles J. Ryan, MD, Associate Professor of Clinical Med icine, Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of California, San Francisco, who reported a planned interim analysis of a phase 3 study at the 2012 meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

In men with metastatic prostate cancer, especially those with minimal disease spread, continuous rather than intermittent hormonal therapy should be considered the preferred therapy, according to the results of a large multicenter phase 3 international trial.

Chicago, IL—The novel antibody drug conjugate trastuzumab emtansine (T-DM1) significantly extended progression-free survival (PFS) and was very well tolerated in the first results of the international EMILIA trial, which were presented at the 2012 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting.

Ipilimumab—added in a phased regimen to paclitaxel and carboplatin chemotherapy—increased progressionfree survival (PFS) and immune-related PFS in a randomized, double-blind, international, phase 2 study of previously untreated adult patients with non–small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

In a single-arm, phase 2 study, inotuzumab ozogamicin, a CD22 monoclonal antibody conjugate, showed potential utility as a monotherapy that may improve the often poor prognosis for patients with refractory or relapsed acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL; Kantarjian H, et al. Lancet Oncol. 2012;13:403-411).

Current reimbursement policies for cancer chemotherapies do not ensure that the value and cost of therapies are commensurate with outcomes.

Assessments of the value of cancer therapies have been based on the assumption that stakeholders care most about average or median gain in survival or quality-adjusted survival.

Two of the largest diagnostic imaging centers in the country—Insight Imaging in California and Centers for Diagnostic Imaging (CDI) in Minneapolis—have announced that they are merging forces.

At the 2012 annual meeting of the Society of Nuclear Medicine, researchers presented new results for the radioisotope therapy radium-223 chloride, suggesting that these results represent a new treatment protocol for patients with advanced prostate cancer that has spread to the bone.

A study funded by the National Cancer Institute, the National Institutes of Health, a Theodore N. Law Endowment for Scientific Achievement, and a Dodie P. Hawn Fellowship in Cancer Genetics Research surprisingly showed that the presence of normal p53, a tumor suppressor gene and not the mutated gene, was making chemotherapy with doxorubicin less effective in breast cancer; it is the mutated gene that actually enhances the benefit of the drug and not the reverse.