ASCO 2015 Highlights

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.”

Early results from the phase 2 TheraP clinical trial show that the targeted radiation therapy Lutetium-177 PSMA-617 (Lu-PSMA) significantly improved prostate-specific antigen (PSA) response compared with standard cabazitaxel in men with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC) that progressed after docetaxel therapy.

Adjuvant therapy with atezolizumab (Tecentriq) did not meet the primary end point of disease-free survival (DFS) in patients with muscle-invasive urothelial cancer (MIUC) at high risk for recurrence versus observation alone in the primary analysis of the IMvigor010 trial.

A total of 80% of patients with relapsed or refractory indolent non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) achieved a complete response (CR) to axicabtagene ciloleucel (Yescarta), and those responses have proved durable, according to the interim results of the phase 2 ZUMA-5 study, said Caron A. Jacobson, MD, Medical Director, Immune Effector Cell Therapy Program, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, MA, at the ASCO 2020 virtual annual meeting.