Atlanta, GA—A novel, third-generation, oral tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI), PF-114 mesylate, has antileukemic activity in heavily pretreated patients with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML), including those with T315I mutation, said Jorge E. Cortes, MD, Deputy Chair, Department of Leukemia, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX, at ASH 2017. In an ongoing, [ Read More ]
Atlanta, GA—As single-agent immunotherapies continue to show promising results, the challenge is now to determine which combination regimens with immunotherapies can improve outcomes. According to data presented at ASH 2017, 3 approaches are currently being explored, which include: Using immunotherapies to replace nonspecific cytotoxic agents to increase efficacy and reduce [ Read More ]
David Hermel, MD
Resident Physician, Internal Medicine
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
Darren Sigal, MD
Attending Physician, Division of Hematology/Oncology
Scripps Clinic Medical Group, San Diego, CA
William Coley’s late 19th-century observation of “spontaneous tumor regression” following injection of streptococcal organisms into the bloodstream of his patients set the stage for more than a century of public debate over the relationship between cancer and the immune system.1 Only recently, with the success of immune checkpoint inhibitors in [ Read More ]
Immunotherapy with nivolumab resulted in durable responses and promising overall survival (OS) in a dose-escalation and -expansion trial of patients with advanced liver cancer. The 12-month OS rate exceeded 60% in patients in whom sorafenib had failed, and responses occurred in patients with the hepatitis B virus (HBV) or hepatitis [ Read More ]
The addition of the novel monoclonal antibody elotuzumab to dexamethasone plus lenalidomide resulted in a 30% reduction in the risk for disease progression and death in patients with relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma. These interim results from the ELOQUENT-2 phase 3 trial, the largest study of a monoclonal antibody in [ Read More ]
Combination treatment with the immunotherapies nivolumab and ipilimumab led to a doubling in progression-free survival (PFS) compared with ipilimumab alone in patients with advanced melanoma, investigators from the CheckMate 067 trial reported. The study also suggested promise for programmed death-1 (PD-1) ligand 1 (PD-L1) as a biomarker of response that [ Read More ]
Pembrolizumab achieved “remarkable” results in a phase 1 study of previously treated, recurrent, squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck. Tumor shrinkage was observed in 57% of these poor-prognosis, heavily pretreated patients, and 24.8% had partial or complete response on treatment with pembrolizumab in an expansion cohort of the [ Read More ]
With the surge in new immunotherapies becoming available for the treatment of melanoma, non–small cell lung cancer, bladder cancer, and other solid tumors, it is important to know how to assess response patterns that differ from those of chemotherapy, manage the unique side effects, and understand the mechanisms of action [ Read More ]
New to the programmed death-1 (PD-1) inhibitor arena is colorectal cancer, and for this tumor it may be possible to predict which patients will benefit from these drugs. In a phase 2 study of patients with colorectal cancer treated with pembrolizumab, the presence of mismatch repair (MMR) deficiency within the [ Read More ]
The programmed death-1 ligand 1 (PD-L1) inhibitor atezolizumab (formerly MPDL3280A) had encouraging activity in a cohort of heavily pretreated patients with metastatic urothelial bladder cancer (UBC). PD-L1 status as measured by an SP142 assay appears to be predictive of the benefit of atezolizumab in UBC, but it is not predictive [ Read More ]