Anita T. Shaffer

The liquid biopsy testing method correlated closely with mutations described in databases and in some cases from tumor biopsies.

A biosimilar version of trastuzumab demonstrated equivalent efficacy and safety to the FDA-approved branded drug in a randomized phase III study among patients with HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer.

Immunotherapy agents targeting the PD-1/PD-L1 pathway will be the most robust area for news at the 2016 ASCO Annual Meeting, but there will be much new data about recently approved and novel anticancer drugs for clinicians to digest.

Research into 6 drugs scheduled to be presented during the upcoming 2016 ASCO Annual Meeting stand out as the most noteworthy abstracts on the docket this year because of their potential to influence clinical practice in the near future.

Forty percent of patients with advanced melanoma who started taking pembrolizumab during the clinical trial that led to its initial approval were still alive after 3 years, with many responders in remission even after stopping treatment.

Immunotherapy approaches are showing early signs of activity against a range of gastrointestinal cancers, defying the skeptical view that these tumors would not respond to the emerging agents succeeding in other malignancies.

Cancer care is shifting from a consumption to a value-based model, and precision oncology should play a vital role in that process by helping to deliver more effective therapies with more manageable pricing profiles.

John L. Marshall, MD, discusses how the management of patients with gastrointestinal cancers requires a multidisciplinary approach.

Talimogene laherparepvec (T-VEC; Imlygic), an oncolytic viral immunotherapy approved for patients with melanoma, is being evaluated in a presurgical setting in a phase II clinical trial that may help set the stage for expanding the toolkit of neoadjuvant options for patients with the malignancy.

Vincent T. DeVita Jr, MD, discusses his insights into the operations of the FDA and the National Cancer Institute will hold a special appeal for oncology specialists and healthcare providers in his book, "The Death of Cancer."

The bounty of choices is good news for patients with melanoma, several key questions have emerged: Should immunotherapy or targeted agents be the first-line choice for metastatic melanoma?

The search for immune system biomarkers that could prove clinically useful in treating patients with breast cancer is yielding promising results, particularly in triple-negative subtypes.

Acalabrutinib has demonstrated a 95% response rate and durable remissions with a favorable safety profile in a phase I/II study for patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia.

The addition of pembrolizumab to an established multiple myeloma regimen elicited responses in 76% of 17 patients with relapsed/refractory disease.

Venetoclax, demonstrated an overall response rate of nearly 80% among patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia harboring the chromosome 17p deletion.

The addition of daratumumab to a standard multiple myeloma regimen generated responses in 81% of patients with relapsed or refractory disease that were "rapid, deep, and durable" without introducing any new safety concerns.

Gene therapy has the potential to deliver long-lasting remissions for patients with advanced B-cell malignancies who already have undergone an allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplant.

As the class of agents targeting the PD-1/PD-L1 pathway expands in non–small cell lung cancer, so does the potential population of patients who would be candidates for the groundbreaking immunotherapy.

An international coalition of experts is planning an innovative clinical trial aimed at speeding up the development of new treatments for patients with glioblastoma multiforme, putting into motion a biomarker-driven approach that has been employed in other malignancies.

Patience is a virtue when it comes to deciding whether to switch therapies for individuals with metastatic non–small cell lung cancer who appear to be progressing on an EGFR-targeting regimen.

The latest FDA approval for nivolumab in non–small cell lung cancer means that the drug potentially can be administered to any patient in the second-line setting, regardless of tumor histology or PD-L1 expression level.

The prospect of combining PD-1 inhibitors with existing therapies, particularly brentuximab vedotin, is emerging as the most exciting new development in advancing the treatment of patients with Hodgkin lymphoma, raising the possibility of improving the cure rates in a disease where standard strategies have already produced notable results.

Less than a decade after the FDA set the ground rules for developing assays that pair molecular targets with new drugs, experts say there have been strides in personalizing anticancer therapies but that many hurdles remain before next-generation sequencing and other precision medicine advances are incorporated into the diagnostic paradigm.

The use of multigene assays to screen patients for hereditary breast and ovarian cancer risk yields clinically valuable information beyond single-gene BRCA testing, but confusion about accurately interpreting the results presents a challenge for clinicians even as panel testing becomes more widely adopted.

Eli Lilly and Company is planning to expand its lab space at the Alexandria Center for Life Science in New York City to include a translational immuno-oncology hub that will serve as a "portal" for collaborating with researchers from nearby academic medical centers and biopharmaceutical companies.

The addition of cetuximab (Erbitux) to chemotherapy reduced the risk of death by 44% for patients with advanced squamous non–small cell lung cancer whose tumors test positive for EGFR gene amplification.

Research evidence has been mounting that PARP inhibitors are not just for gynecologic malignancies-or for patients whose tumors harbor inherited BRCA defects.

Amid continuing excitement over the potential for immunotherapies targeting the PD-1/PD-L1 pathway, two major questions have loomed over PD-L1 expression levels as a biomarker for this emerging new class of drugs.

For clinicians, a central message from 2015 ASCO is that a framework for managing immune-related adverse events in patients who receive these immune checkpoint agents is taking shape.

A landmark clinical trial that will channel patients into treatment arms based on molecular abnormalities rather than cancer types aims to test the efficacy of more than 20 drugs simultaneously in an ambitious National Cancer Institute plan to further propel oncology drug discovery into the precision medicine era.