OncTimes Talk

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 t...

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, Genoa, Ita...

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 at the E...

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 nega...

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...

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 2...

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 wit...

The CARACO prospective, multi-institutional, Phase III trial, among patients with newly diagnosed advanced epithelial ovarian cancer, found that lymphadenectomy should be omitted in patients with clinically negative lymph nodes, as well as those undergoing neoadjuvant chemotherapy and interval complete surgery. This finding from the University of Nantes was reported at the 2024 ASCO Annual Meeting...

A combination of two checkpoint inhibitors used as neoadjuvant therapy for macroscopic, resectable Stage III melanoma brought a highly statistically significant improvement over the standard of care: surgery followed by checkpoint inhibition (therapeutic lymph node dissection followed by adjuvant therapy with nivolumab, pembrolizumab or, in BRAFmut melanoma, dabrafenib + trametinib). This research...

Primary results from ASC4FIRST trial, the first study in chronic myeloid leukemia comparing current standard-of-care frontline tyrosine kinase inhibitors with the novel agent asciminib in newly diagnosed patients, were reported at the 2024 ASCO Annual Meeting.     First author Timothy Hughes MD, Consultant Hematologist with the Royal Adelaide Hospital, the South Australian Health and Medical Resea...

Treatment with perioperative chemotherapy, with chemotherapy before and after surgery, brought superior outcomes for patients with locally advanced esophageal adenocarcinoma, in research reported to the 2024 ASCO Annual Meeting.   Lead author Jens Höppner FAChirg, FACS, MD, Director of the Department of Surgery in the University Medical Center at the University of Bielefeld in Germany, spoke with...

Data from the DESTINY Breast06 trial using the antibody-drug conjugate trastuzumab deruxtecan to treat patients with estrogen receptor positive (HR+), human epidermal growth factor receptor-low (HER2-low), and HER2-ultralow breast cancer after endocrine therapy, show longer progression-free survival in comparison with standard chemotherapy.     After announcing the results at the 2024 ASCO Annual...

New data from the Phase III LAURA study, reported in Chicago at the ASCO 2024 Annual Meeting Plenary Session, suggest that the tyrosine kinase inhibitor osimertinib could become standard of care for treating patients whose unresectable locally advanced lung cancers test positive for mutated epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) and have no progression after definitive chemoradiotherapy.   In Chi...

When the immune checkpoint inhibitor durvalumab was added to standard-of-care chemoradiation treatment for patients with limited-stage small-cell lung cancer, it brought a "statistically significant and clinically meaningful" improvement in overall and progression-free survival, compared to adding placebo. This was in data from the ADRIATIC study reported in the Plenary Session at the 2024 ASCO An...

An improvement over standard care in both efficacy and safety of a new combination regimen for treating Hodgkin lymphoma was discussed at the 2024 ASCO Annual Meeting in Chicago. The six-drug BrECADD regimen was compared with the high-achieving German-originated BEACOPP chemotherapy that has been widely adopted as standard of care.   During the conference, Oncology Times reporter Peter Goodwin met...

The 2024 AACR Annual Meeting heard that an "efficacy signal" was detected in an international Phase I study of a new radiosensitizer, tested as adjunctive therapy (combined with standard radiation plus temozolomide) in patients with recurrent glioblastoma.   After reporting his group's early findings of AZD1390, an inhibitor of ataxia telangiectasia mutated (ATM) kinase studied in 115 patients wit...

A combination of a new mRNA vaccine used together with a programmed death-ligand 1 (PD-L1) immune checkpoint inhibitor to treat patients with lung cancer was markedly less toxic than a combination of the same vaccine with chemotherapy. However, it was apparently just effective. This is according to findings from a study reported to the 2024 AACR Annual Meeting.   The randomized study, led by the r...

A new blood test that uses artificial intelligence to analyze circulating molecular markers for the earliest signs of ovarian and other cancers has been reported by researchers.     At the AACR 2024 Annual Meeting in San Diego, Victor Velculescu, MD, PhD, Co-Director of the Cancer Genetics & Epigenetics Program at Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center, reported his group's validation of the test that...

An early study using selective inhibition of the Poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP) has provided evidence it could bring greater cancer control with less toxicity than the well-proven non-selective PARP 1 and PARP 2 inhibitors already in use for treating a number of tumor types. At the AACR Annual Meeting 2024, Timothy Yap, PhD, MD, MBBS, Vice President and Head of Clinical Development in the The...

Findings from a new study support a body of evidence showing that physical exercise can bring benefits to patients with advanced prostate cancer. Data from an intervention study reported at the AACR Annual Meeting 2024 are consistent with mounting epidemiological evidence showing that regular physical exercise can help patients with advanced or metastatic prostate cancer "deter" death, slow diseas...