Global Oncology

January 13, 2021 - Health Canada has approved the combination of ibrutinib and rituximab for use in patients with treatment-naïve chronic lymphocytic leukemia.

January 8th, 2021 - The United Kingdom’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence has issued guidelines recommending against nivolumab for use in patients with recurrent or metastatic head and neck squamous cell carcinoma who experienced disease progression during or after platinum-based chemotherapy.

January 6, 2021 — The oral small molecule inhibitor VS-6766, developed by Verastem Oncology, is now under investigation alone and in combination with the FAK inhibitor defactinib in a recently initiated, registration-directed, phase 2 trial in patients with recurrent low-grade serous ovarian cancer.

January 5, 2020 - A new drug application has been submitted to Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare for the oncolytic virus teserpaturev for use in the treatment of patients with malignant glioma.

January 4th, 2021 - A marketing authorization application has been submitted to the European Medicines Agency for the approval of amivantamab as a treatment for patients with metastatic non–small cell lung cancer that harbors EGFR exon 20 insertion mutations who have experienced disease progression following platinum-based chemotherapy.

January 4, 2021 - A marketing authorization application has been submitted to the European Medicines Agency for the use of sotorasib in patients with KRAS G12C–mutated locally advanced or metastatic non–small cell lung cancer.

December 30, 2020 - The China National Medical Products Administration has approved surufatinib for the treatment of patients with non-pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors.

December 23, 2020 - The European Commission has approved the fixed-dose combination of pertuzumab and trastuzumab with hyaluronidase, to be administered via a subcutaneous injection in the treatment of patients with early and metastatic HER2-positive breast cancer.

Othman Al-Sawaf, MD, discusses the limitations of continuous therapy administration in chronic lymphocytic leukemia.

December 17, 2020 — The European Commission has granted a conditional marketing authorization to the CD19-targeted CAR T-cell therapy KTE-X19 for use in adult patients with relapsed or refractory mantle cell lymphoma who had previously received 2 or more lines of systemic therapy including a BTK inhibitor.

Timothy Price, MBBS, DHthSc, FRACP, discusses the rationale to evaluate sotorasib in gastrointestinal cancers.

December 15, 2020 - The European Medicines Agency’s Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use has adopted a positive opinion for an additional dosing option of durvalumab, a fixed dose of 1500 mg every 4 weeks, in the approved indication of locally advanced, unresectable non–small cell lung cancer in adults whose tumors have a PD-L1 expression of at least 1% and who did not have progressive disease after platinum-based chemoradiation treatment.

Circulating tumor DNA positivity identified patients with high-risk muscle-invasive urothelial cancer who were likely to derive improvements in disease-free survival and overall survival from adjuvant atezolizumab vs observation.

Nadia Harbeck, MD, PhD, discusses Ki-67 as a biomarker for identifying patients with high-risk early breast cancer who received treatment on the monarchE trial.

December 11, 2020 - The European Medicine Agency’ s Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use has granted a positive opinion to avelumab as a single agent, frontline maintenance option for adult patients with locally advanced or metastatic urothelial carcinoma who are free of disease progression after platinum-based chemotherapy.

December 11, 2020 - The European Medicines Agency’s Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use has granted a positive opinion to tucatinib in combination with trastuzumab and capecitabine for use in adult patients with HER2-positive, locally advanced or metastatic breast cancer who had received at least 2 previous anti-HER2 therapies.

December 11, 2020 - The European Medicine Agency’s Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use has adopted a positive opinion for pembrolizumab monotherapy for the frontline treatment of adult patients with metastatic microsatellite instability–high or mismatch repair deficient colorectal cancer.

December 10, 2020 — The combination of ipatasertib and paclitaxel failed to show a significant improvement in progression-free survival vs placebo plus paclitaxel in patients with PIK3CA/AKT1/PTEN-altered locally advanced, unresectable or metastatic triple-negative breast cancer.

December 10, 2020 - Treatment with abemaciclib in combination with endocrine therapy significantly reduced the risk of invasive disease recurrence or death in patients with hormone receptor–positive, HER2-negative, node-positive, early breast cancer who had high Ki-67 tumors, suggesting that this feature can be used in conjunction with high-risk features to select patients for abemaciclib in the adjuvant setting.

Robert Zeiser, MD, discusses results of the REACH3 trial in chronic graft-versus-host disease.

Christian Buske, MD, discusses ​the results of the iNNOVATE trial in Waldenström macroglobulinemia.

Nigerian patients with prostate cancer are noted as having higher levels of total plasma peroxide, malondialdehyde, and nitric oxide, as well as lower levels of total antioxidant capacity, even while undergoing androgen-deprivation therapy compared with Nigerian men who don't have prostate cancer.

Vincent J. Picozzi Jr, MD, spotlights the launch of PanCAN’s Precision Promise clinical trial platform, and how it is expected to impact clinical practice.

The Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare has approved cabozantinib for the treatment of patients with unresectable hepatocellular carcinoma that has progressed on prior systemic therapy.

November 23, 2020 - The China National Medical Products Administration has approved denosumab for the prevention of skeletal-related events in patients with bone metastases from solid tumors and in those with multiple myeloma.