OncTimes Talk

A numerical formula called the absolute percentage pattern 4/5 (APP4) combining risk factors, including Gleason grade, PSA, and digital rectal examination, is being used to select patients whose intermediate risk prostate cancer can safely be followed with active surveillance.   A research study using APP4 was reported at the 2025 ASCO Genitourinary Cancers Symposium in San Francisco. First author...

Masood Moghul, MBBS, a urologist and research fellow at the Royal Marsden Hospital and Institute of Cancer Research in London, UK, discussed his group's findings from the Man Van study investigating a mobile, targeted, case-finding approach to prostate cancer detection with 3,379 patients conducted in Greater London.   Moghul told the 2025 ASCO Genitourinary Cancers Symposium in San Francisco how...

The pivotal role of programmed death-ligand 1 (PD-L1) checkpoint inhibition for treating advanced melanoma has been confirmed in findings from the KEYNOTE-006 study comparing the anti-PD-L1 antibody pembrolizumab immunotherapy with the anti-cytotoxic T-lymphocyte associated protein 4 (CTLA-4) drug ipilimumab for treating patients with unresectable advanced or metastatic melanoma. Results from the...

Although one in five colorectal cancers having microsatellite instability and expressing the Werner Helicase (WRN) gene could be treated with drugs that inhibit WRN, the effectiveness of such an approach has been limited by resistance. However, researchers identified the Cys727 mutation as being solely responsible for WRN inhibitor resistance. This potentially opens the door to using WRN inhibitor...

The pivotal role of programmed death-ligand 1 (PD-L1) checkpoint inhibition for treating advanced melanoma has been confirmed in findings from the KEYNOTE-006 study comparing the anti-PD-L1 antibody pembrolizumab immunotherapy with the anti-cytotoxic T-lymphocyte associated protein 4 (CTLA-4) drug ipilimumab for treating patients with unresectable advanced or metastatic melanoma. Results from the...

A tumor-agnostic classifier and screening tool was announced at ESMO Congress 2024 in Barcelona. It was created to make it easier and quicker to develop new drugs that have specific molecular targets, and thus have potential anti-cancer efficacy irrespective of tumor type or location.   The ESMO Tumour-Agnostic Classifier and Screener was the result of work by a   multidisciplinary team of interna...

Findings from a study of patients receiving targeted therapy for their BRAFV600 mutation-positive advanced melanoma, suggest that switching early to immune checkpoint inhibition appeared to bring better rates of overall survival than saving immunotherapy for use as salvage treatment later on.   The ESMO 2024 Annual Congress heard from the randomized Phase II ImmunoCobiVem trial that a switch to im...

A clinically meaningful benefit in overall survival was found in the second interim analysis of the randomized, double-blind, Phase III KEYNOTE-A18 study of immunotherapy together with concurrent chemoradiotherapy among 1,060 patients who had newly diagnosed, previously untreated high-risk locally advanced cervical cancer.   A multinational team of researchers, led from Italy, reported findings at...

In this podcast episode, Ruchika Talwar, MD, sits down with Rick Baehner, MD, Chief Medical Officer of Precision Oncology at Exact Sciences and Clinical Professor of Pathology at University of California, San Francisco, to discuss the importance of ultra-comprehensive genomic profiling in advanced cancer therapy selection. The two talk about the OncoExTra® test from Exact Sciences, which includes...

The prospect of markedly raising chemotherapy response rates and extending patient survival has been held out by scientists reporting a new AI-powered digital tool to optimize cancer management for individual patients.   The tool creates a "digital twin" for each patient that makes it possible to predict response to specific treatment regimens and confidently predict outcomes, according to finding...

The prospect of a minimally toxic, chemotherapy-free cure for hepatoblastoma is held out by findings from a mouse model using the small-molecule drug WNTinib that inhibits the Wnt signaling pathway involved with cancer growth.   Lead author Ugnė Balaševičiūtė, a pre-doctoral researcher in Translational Research of the Hepatic Oncology Group led by Josep M. Llovet, Professor at the Institut D'Inves...

A chemotherapy-free combination of two anti-human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (anti-HER2) agents brought clinically meaningful responses to patients with bile duct cancers testing positive for HER2 or with mutated HER2 in research from Japan reported at the EORTC-NCI-AACR 2024 Molecular Targets and Cancer Therapeutics Symposium held in Barcelona, Spain.   In the SGNTUC-019 Phase II basket s...

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.   Th...

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 Times corres...

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 Times...

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-associ...

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 inhibitor neoadjuva...

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 cardio-onc...

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...