Oncology Times - OncTimes Talk

The fibroblast growth factor receptor-3 (FGFR-3) inhibitor TYRA-300 has been found safe with dose-dependent responses and disease control in the Phase I SURF301 trial. The study included 41 patients who had been heavily pre-treated for their advanced solid tumors with activating FGFR3 mutations/fusions, bringing the hope of avoiding toxicities from the use of non-specific pan-FGFR inhibition. &nbs...

The mini-protein radiopharmaceutical AKY-1189, designed to deliver the alpha-emitting isotope Actinium-225 (225Ac) to tumors expressing the Nectin-4 transmembrane protein, has been found to achieve favorable dosing to tumors, while minimizing exposure to non-target tissues, including the kidney. Data on the biodistribution and tumor uptake of the drug were reported at the 2024 EORTC-NCI-AACR 2024...

In a Phase I study with 318 patients in China and Australia the antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) IBI354 was found to be safe and have promising efficacy in patients whose breast and other solid tumors tested positive for HER2 or were categorized as “HER2-low.” At ESMO Congress 2024, the study also reported a low rate of interstitial lung disease in patients treated with the ADC. Oncology...

Sustained responses and long-term overall survival have resulted from checkpoint inhibitor therapy for advanced melanoma, transforming the prognosis for as many as half of patients. This is according to 10-year survival outcomes from the Phase Ill CheckMate 067 trial of nivolumab plus ipilimumab in advanced melanoma that were reported at the ESMO Congress 2024.   At the conference, Oncology T...

The addition of preoperative chemoradiation therapy to perioperative chemotherapy did not improve overall survival as compared with perioperative chemotherapy alone in patients with resectable gastric or gastroesophageal junction adenocarcinomas. The multi-continent, Phase III randomized TOPGEAR trial has definitively found no benefit from adding radiation before surgery in terms of overall or pro...

Patients with muscle-invasive bladder cancer experienced “clinically meaningful” improvements in key outcomes—event-free survival and overall survival—when the immune checkpoint inhibitor durvalumab was added to their standard neoadjuvant chemotherapy. This was in research findings, reported at the ESMO Congress 2024, from the NIAGARA randomized Phase Ill trial of neoadjuvant durvalumab plus chemo...

When patients with recurrent high-grade glioblastoma were treated with autologous myeloid dendritic cells, they had clinical responses described as “encouraging” in a Phase I clinical trial reported at the ESMO Congress 2024. Cells harvested from each patient were injected directly into the resection cavity brain tissue lining after surgery. Patients also received intracranial injections of the ch...

Patients with newly diagnosed, surgically resected MGMT-unmethylated glioblastoma may benefit from treatment with a therapeutic mRNA vaccine called CVGBM, according to findings from a first-in-human, Phase I safety and dose-escalation study from Tübingen, Germany, reported at the ESMO Congress 2024 held in Barcelona. The CVGBM vaccine encodes multiple molecular features derived from tumor-ass...

A large, expanded-cohort pooled analysis of neoadjuvant immunotherapy for patients with resectable Stage III melanoma has reported very high rates of durable survival. The findings from the world’s biggest center of expertise in melanoma were announced at ESMO Congress 2024.   The study included patients from clinical trials and real-world studies who had pure immune checkpoint inhibito...

Drug resistance can be delayed and treatment outcomes predicted in patients with ovarian cancer with the help of relatively low-cost molecular precision management techniques using liquid biopsies. These are being developed by a team at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) led by Jian Yu Rao, MD, Vice Chair of Diagnostic Technology Innovation at UCLA, where he is also Chief of Cytopa...

Important findings about the benefit of neoadjuvant therapies, especially those involving checkpoint inhibition, have been reported at the ESMO 2024 Congress. Rebecca Dent, MD, Scientific Chair of the meeting, as well as Medical Oncologist and Deputy Chief Executive Officer at the National Cancer Center in Singapore (with a special interest in all aspects of triple-negative breast cancer), shared...

The escalating danger of cardiac toxicity posed by a range of increasingly effective anti-cancer therapies is insufficiently understood, according to the head of a world center of excellence for the study of cardio-oncology in northern China.    At a special session devoted to cardio-oncology held at the Chinese Society of Clinical Oncology (CSCO) 2024 Annual Meeting, the challenges of c...

Details of the expanding range of cell therapies beyond hematologic malignancy were reported at the 2024 Annual Meeting of the Chinese Society of Clinical Oncology (CSCO) by Oliver Dorigo, MD, PhD, Director of the Division of Gynecologic Oncology at the Stanford Women's Cancer Center in Stanford University. After his talk at CSCO, Dorigo told Oncology Times reporter Peter Goodwin about the promise...

An assessment of progress with antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) for the treatment of HER2-dependent metastatic breast cancer was given at the 2024 Chinese Society of Clinical Oncology (CSCO) Annual Meeting. The President-Elect of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO), Giuseppe Curigliano, MD, PhD, Director of the Early Drug Development for Innovative Therapies Division at the European In...

At the opening session of the Chinese Society of Clinical Oncology (CSCO) 2024 Annual Meeting, attended by nearly 30,000 cancer specialists, Oncology Times reporter Peter Goodwin asked the President of CSCO, Xu Ruihua, MD, PhD, Professor and President of Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center in Guangzhou, China, to talk about some of the ways that progress in cancer treatments had been made more pr...

Important findings about the benefit of neoadjuvant therapies, especially those involving checkpoint inhibition, have been reported at the 2024 Annual meeting of the European Society for Medical Oncology, ESMO. The Scientific Chair of the meeting, Rebecca Dent MD, Deputy Chief Executive Officer of the National Cancer Center in Singapore, told Oncology Times reporter Peter Goodwin about some of the...

A large international cohort study has found that women testing positive for the BRCA mutation who chose to breastfeed their babies after treatment for their breast cancer faced no additional risk to their cancer outcomes.    OncTimesTalk correspondent Peter Goodwin talked with Eva Blondeaux, MD, Medical Oncologist in the Epidemiology Unit at the IRCCS Ospedale Policlinico San Martino, G...

Women who chose to interrupt their endocrine therapy after their breast cancer surgery to have a baby faced no additional cancer risk, according to data from the POSITIVE study reported at the ESMO Congress 2024.    In Barcelona, OncTimesTalk reporter Peter Goodwin met up with Fedro Peccatori, MD, PhD, Director of the Fertility and Procreation Unit in the Division of Gynecologic Oncology...

Important findings about the benefit of neoadjuvant therapies, especially those involving checkpoint inhibition, have been reported at the ESMO 2024 Congress. Rebecca Dent MD, Scientific Chair of the meeting, as well as Medical Oncologist and Deputy Chief Executive Officer at the National Cancer Center, Singapore (with a special interest in all aspects of triple-negative breast cancer), shared the...

HPV vaccination for girls and boys in the United States has led to a real-world reduction of oral head and neck cancers in men, as well as the already documented prevention of cervical cancers in women, even though uptake of the vaccine in the U.S. has been suboptimal. This is according to findings from a retrospective analysis of HPV-associated cancer incidence, reported at the 2024 ASCO Annual M...

Although co-medication with proton pump inhibitors (PPI) is not advised for patients being treated with dasatanib for their chronic myeloid leukemia (CML), confirmation that this recommendation is often overlooked has been reported in a study led by Torsten Dahlén, a PhD student at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden. Furthermore, the study found a higher than previously reported...

Patients who had immune-related adverse events had better responses and lived longer than those who didn’t. This was a real-world observational study of patients with recurrent or metastatic head and neck squamous cell carcinoma treated with immune checkpoint inhibitor monotherapy, reported at the 2024 ASCO Annual Meeting. OncTimesTalk reporter Peter Goodwin caught up with the lead study author Ch...

A mathematical model using data from routine diagnostic samples has been found to accurately predict individual patient responses to the main candidate first-line treatments for acute myeloid leukemia. Findings from a validation study in independent patient cohorts led by researchers from the Barts Cancer Institute at the Queen Mary University of London were reported at a poster session of the 202...

When the mucin-1 (MUC-1) vaccine tecemotide was added to standard-of-care neoadjuvant systemic therapy, investigators in Austria found improved long-term outcomes in women with early breast cancer. Individuals vaccinated with tecemotide had markedly longer distant recurrence-free and overall survival. This was in the randomized prospective ABCSG-34 trial presented at the 2024 ASCO Annual Meeting....

Not only can palliative care be delivered effectively by telehealth to patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer, it’s also as effective as face-to-face delivery by specialist clinicians, according to a study reported at the 2024 ASCO Annual Meeting. In addition, telehealth turned out to be more popular. For the Oncology Times podcast, OncTimesTalk, correspondent Peter Goodwin spoke with J...