Lisa Miller

Thomas F. Gajewski, MD, PhD, has made inroads in the field of cancer immunotherapy, most notably discovering the connections between the microbiome and clinical outcomes—findings that will enable the creation of microbiota-modulating interventions to improve outcomes in patients undergoing cancer treatments.

Adjuvant therapy with tyrosine kinase inhibitors for patients with high-risk renal cell carcinoma (RCC) who have undergone a nephrectomy may be supported by level IIa evidence from the National Comprehensive Cancer Network guidelines.

Outpatient branded drug sales in the 340B Drug Pricing Program now amount to almost 8% of the total market, well up from 5.4% in 2012.

While several biomarkers have been identified in patients with breast cancer, including ESR1 and PIK3CA mutations, not all of these are driver mutations that can be effectively targeted with treatment.

Experts are trying to determine whether combination regimens with additional HER2-directed therapies or alternative therapies could improve responses in HER2-positive breast cancer without added toxicities.

The National Comprehensive Cancer Network published its first set of guidelines for myeloproliferative neoplasms in October 2016 and is already looking to update and expand these guidelines.

Howard A. “Skip” Burris III, MD, detailed the benefits of performing next-generation sequencing tests on patients with cancer at the 2017 Community Oncology Conference.

Sukhmani Padda, MD discusses the status of ongoing clinical trials participating in this race to the frontline setting in lung cancer.

A phase II basket trial has been announced to test that mutations in isocitrate dehydrogenase 1 and 2 are not driver mutations that should be targeted with direct IDH inhibitors, but instead they create vulnerabilities that can be exploited through treatment with PARP inhibitors.

Use of antibiotics up to a month before treatment with a checkpoint inhibitor may decrease the efficacy of the immunotherapy agent, results of a retrospective analysis show.

A recent study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology has found that Philadelphia chromosome-like acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) accounts for over 20% of all adult patients with ALL and is correlated with poor outcomes.

Pembrolizumab provided durable activity for previously treated patients with mucosal melanoma, according to data coming out of 3 clinical trials.

The addition of onartuzumab to bevacizumab did not provide any increased clinical benefit in the treatment of patients with recurrent glioblastoma multiforme.

Women who are experiencing symptoms of menopause are less likely to adhere to treatment, according to findings presented at the 2016 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.

Regorafenib (Stivarga) has demonstrated the first survival benefit for a systemic therapy in the second-line setting for patients with advanced hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) who have progressed on sorafenib (Nexavar), according to results from the phase III RESORCE trial published in The Lancet.1

Adjuvant ibandronate (Boniva) added to hormone therapy did not provide a clinical benefit to postmenopausal patients with HR-positive, early-stage breast cancer, according to findings from the phase III TEAM IIB trial.

The addition of everolimus (Afinitor) to fulvestrant (Faslodex) significantly improved progression-free survival rates in postmenopausal patients with metastatic hormone receptor–positive, HER2-negative breast cancer who are resistant to aromatase inhibitor therapy.

An expert panel has issued a set of guidelines for patients with gastroesophageal adenocarcinoma, recommending that they be tested for HER2 status before initiation of targeted therapy.

Recent research suggests that the presence of PD-L1–positive and CD8+ cells may be useful for predicting responses in patients with non-small cell lung cancer who have been treated with durvalumab.

Though some patients with medullary thyroid cancer can live with their disease without progression for long periods of time, the majority will eventually enter a phase in which their cancer becomes much more aggressive.

To properly manage patients with DNA mismatch repair deficiency rectal cancer, one must have a well-rounded understanding of the molecular and clinical causes and risks associated with this subgroup of patients.

Although checkpoint blockade inhibitors targeting the PD-1/PD-L1 pathway are currently dominating the oncology community's attention, there are many other exciting approaches to anticancer immunotherapy being explored in a range of solid tumors

In patients with EGFR-mutant non–small cell lung cancer, the incidence of leptomeningeal metastases is found to be common; moreover, the optimal treatment for this occurrence was determined to be tyrosine kinase inhibitors.

Collective findings from clinical trials show that, for women with early-stage breast cancer who have a low 21-gene recurrence score, adding chemotherapy to standard hormonal therapy does not show a difference in survival.

In terms of neoadjuvant therapies for patients with HER2-positive breast cancer, dual anti–HER2-directed agents seem to have the most benefit.

A liquid biopsy test of circulating tumor DNA for residual disease may be able to determine the risk of recurrence for patients with stage II colon cancer beyond radiologic tests and clinicopathological risk features.

Phase I trial results demonstrate that abemaciclib, a CDK 4/6 inhibitor, had significant clinical activity and an overall response rate of 31% in patients with hormone receptor-positive breast cancer.

An individualized, risk-based approach to screening current and former smokers for the early detection of lung cancer would dramatically expand the population that could benefit from the preventive strategy, while saving more lives than the current US Preventive Services Task Force guidelines for lung cancer screening.

The use of immunohistochemistry could be a more cost- and time-efficient first-line screening method for identifying ROS1 gene rearrangements to predict eligibility for crizotinib (Xalkori) for patients with non–small cell lung cancer compared with fluorescence in-situ hybridization.