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Gina Columbus

Articles by Gina Columbus

The European Commission has approved pembrolizumab as a monotherapy or in combination with platinum and 5-FU chemotherapy for the frontline treatment of patients with metastatic or unresectable recurrent head and neck squamous cell carcinoma and PD-L1 expression (composite positive score ≥1) on their tumors.

The European Medicines Agency’s Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use has issued a positive opinion for a Marketing Authorization Application of fostamatinib disodium hexahydrate for the treatment of adult patients with chronic immune thrombocytopenia who are refractory to other treatments.

Treatment with the selective ROCK2 inhibitor KD025 led to statistically significant overall response rates in patients with chronic graft-versus-host disease who have received ≥2 prior lines of systemic therapy.

The FDA has approved the pegfilgrastim biosimilar LA-EP2006 (pegfilgrastim-bmez; Ziextenzo) as a treatment to decrease the incidence of infection, exhibited from febrile neutropenia, in patients with nonmyeloid malignancies receiving myelosuppressive anti-cancer therapy that is associated with a clinically significant incidence of febrile neutropenia.

The investigational agent pegvorhyaluronidase alfa in combination with gemcitabine and nab-paclitaxel did not show an improvement in overall survival compared with gemcitabine and nab-paclitaxel alone in patients with metastatic pancreatic cancer, missing the primary endpoint of the phase III HALO-109-301 trial.

The addition of durvalumab (Imfinzi) to platinum-based chemotherapy demonstrated a statistically significant and clinically meaningful improvement in progression-free survival compared with chemotherapy alone in patients with previously untreated metastatic non–small cell lung cancer.

The FDA has informed Blueprint Medicines that it intends to split the proposed indications for its agent avapritinib into two separate new drug applications for patients with gastrointestinal stromal tumor (GIST): one for patients with PDGFRA exon 18–mutant disease regardless of prior therapy, and one for fourth-line GIST.