Audrey Sternberg

The addition of encequidar (HM30181A) to oral paclitaxel is the first oral taxane regimen to result in an improvement in overall response rates as compared with an intravenous administration of paclitaxel in patients with metastatic breast cancer.

Patients with triple-negative breast cancer have greater rates of pathologic complete responses when pembrolizumab is added to neoadjuvant and adjuvant chemotherapy. Furthermore, these benefits are observed across patient subgroups, most notably in those patients with stage III and/or node-positive disease.

Chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy targeting both BCMA and CD38 induced an objective response in >90% of patients with multiple myeloma who had been treated with at least 3 prior therapies and whose disease had spread outside of the bone marrow.

As PARP inhibitors have now moved into the frontline maintenance setting in ovarian cancer, researchers are now seeking to even further capitalize on use of these agents, including indications in treatment-naïve patients.

Given that a watch-and-wait approach is a viable option, clinicians must carefully consider disease characteristics when selecting a treatment strategy in newly diagnosed follicular lymphoma.

Although study findings have identified tumor mutational burden as an important factor in responses to cancer therapy, establishing a definition for expression of this biomarker and harmonizing assays to measure it have proved challenging.

The use of low-dose tamoxifen was shown to significantly reduce the risk of new and recurrent disease following surgery in women diagnosed with breast intraepithelial neoplasia but it did not cause more serious adverse events compared with placebo.

Ethnic differences in the prevalence of neurotoxicity from methotrexate therapy may help explain why minority patients, specifically Hispanics, experience disparities in treatment outcomes for pediatric acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

In combination with weekly paclitaxel, tumor treating fields, an antimitotic therapy that delivers continuous low-intensity electrical fields to the tumor region, has been found safe in platinum-resistant ovarian cancer.