June 2016, Vol 7, No 5

More than 33% of patients with heavily pretreated advanced melanoma are still alive at 5 years after starting nivolumab (Opdivo) monotherapy, reported F. Stephen Hodi, Jr, MD, Director of the Melanoma Center, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, at the 2016 American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) meeting.

“Intralesional therapy is here to stay,” said Sanjiv S. Agarwala, MD, Section Chief, Hematology/­Oncology, St Luke’s University Health Network, Easton, PA, who moderated a debate on this topic at the recent HemOnc Today Melanoma and Cutaneous Malignancies meeting.

The term telehealth is used interchangeably with telemedicine by some organizations. However, telemedicine is typically associated with the delivery of traditional clinical diagnosis and monitoring by using some form of medical technology, whereas telehealth has a much broader definition that comprises education, disease awareness, and wellness, in addition to the use of technology to connect physicians to patients.

Contemporary treatment has led to improvements in survival for all patients with metastatic testicular germ-cell tumors (GCTs), including poor-risk patients, although they still have worse survival. A new study shows that if poor-risk patients receive curative therapy and survive for at least 2 years, their survival approaches that of favorable-risk and intermediate-risk patients. The study supports no further routine scanning 2 years after diagnosis in surviving patients.

More than 50% of women with early-stage endometrial cancer had open surgery, in contradiction to recommendations in clinical guidelines, according to a study reported at the 2016 Society of Gynecologic Oncology (SGO) annual meeting.

An ongoing clinical trial of a novel strategy to evaluate new chemotherapy regimens for patients with early-stage breast cancer has identified another neoadjuvant combination therapy worthy of a phase 3 clinical trial involving patients with HER2-positive breast cancer.

The first liquid biopsy used to detect gene mutations that are associated with non–small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) was approved by the FDA. The cobas EGFR Mutation Test v2 (Roche Molecular Systems), a blood-based companion diagnostic for erlotinib (Tarceva), is indicated as an initial test to detect EGFR gene mutations in patients with NSCLC.