Head & Neck Cancers

Nabil F. Saba, MD, FACP, director, Head and Neck Medical Oncology Program, Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University, professor, Department of Hematology and Medical Oncology, Department of Otolaryngology, Emory University School of Medicine, discusses investigational deintensification approaches in HPV-related oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma.

Nabil F. Saba, MD, FACP, director, Head and Neck Medical Oncology Program, Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University, professor, Department of Hematology and Medical Oncology, Department of Otolaryngology, Emory University School of Medicine, discusses treatment deintensification for patients with HPV-related oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma.

Danny Rischin, MD, director, Division of Cancer Medicine, head, Department of Medical Oncology, Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, Melbourne, Australia, discusses the phase III KEYNOTE-048 trial, which examines pembrolizumab or pembrolizumab plus chemotherapy versus EXTREME as first-line therapy for patients with recurrent/metastatic head and neck squamous cell carcinoma.

Nabil F. Saba, MD, FACP, discussed the role of general practitioners in maintaining the health of their patients with cancer and how to better diagnosis select types of head and neck cancer.

The FDA has approved pembrolizumab (Keytruda) for the first-line treatment of patients with metastatic or unresectable recurrent head and neck squamous cell carcinoma as monotherapy whose tumors express PD-L1 (composite positive score [CPS] ≥1) and also in combination with platinum and fluorouracil (FU) for this patient population, irrespective of PD-L1 expression.

Rozita Yarmand, PhD, assistant professor, Department of Endocrine Neoplasia and Hormonal Disorders-Research, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, discusses unmet needs in medullary thyroid cancer.

Ezra Cohen, MD, associate director, Moores Cancer Center at the University of California, San Diego, discusses the treatment era before immunotherapy in head and neck cancer.

In an effort to build more sophisticated protocols that keep QoL and cost questions at the forefront, Montefiore Einstein Center for Cancer Care and Albert Einstein College of Medicine’s Institute for Onco-Physics created a mathematical model to identify the optimal candidates for proton therapy, the most modern form of radiation therapy for patients with head and neck cancers.

A new staging system for head and neck cancers recognizes that patients with oropharyngeal malignancies associated with the human papillomavirus often have an excellent prognosis, but efforts to deintensify therapy for this population based on a fresh understanding of favorable risk factors may be premature.

Barbara Burtness, MD, professor of Medicine (Medical Oncology) Disease Aligned Research Team Leader, Head and Neck Cancers Program co-director, Developmental Therapeutics Research Program of Yale Cancer Center, discusses the use of biomarkers in metastatic head and neck squamous cell carcinoma.

Fee-for-service tends to result in a surplus of care and unnecessary medical expense, but it probably won’t disappear from the landscape soon.

Hisham Mehanna, PhD, BMedSc, MBChB, FRCS, chair, Head and Neck Surgery, director, Institute of Head and Neck Studies and Education at the Institute of Cancer and Genomic Sciences, University of Birmingham, discusses the design of the De-ESCALaTE trial in patients with HPV-positive head and neck cancer.

Ezra Cohen, MD, associate director, Moores Cancer Center at the University of California, San Diego, discusses the value of progression-free survival (PFS) as an endpoint in head and neck cancer trials.