Late-Stage Studies Star at ASCO 2015

OncLive Chairman,

Mike Hennessy

Another ASCO annual meeting has come and gone, and now comes the fun part where we digest and interpret the significance of the mountains of new data presented. One of the themes that emerged from the meeting was the number of significant large, late-stage clinical trials that were showcased. In this month’s special all-ASCO issue, we highlight these practice-changers, as well as several emerging treatments that have shown great promise.

In lung cancer, nivolumab (Opdivo) has now been shown to have an overall survival benefit versus docetaxel in both nonsquamous and squamous non—small cell lung cancer, according to results from the CheckMate-057 and CheckMate-017 trials, respectively (click here, to view more).

Nivolumab also shined in melanoma, where frontline treatment with the PD-1 inhibitor as monotherapy and in combination with ipilimumab more than doubled progression-free survival (PFS) versus ipilimumab alone in patients with advanced melanoma, according to results from the phase III CheckMate-067 trial (click here, to view more).

Pivotal late-stage study data for several hematologic malignances were also presented. In the phase III HELIOS study, adding ibrutinib (Imbruvica) to standard bendamustine and rituximab reduced the risk of disease progression in patients with pretreated chronic lymphocytic leukemia (click here, to view more).

Patients with relapsed indolent non-Hodgkin lymphoma experienced a doubling of PFS when treated with a combination of the anti-CD20 agent obinutuzumab (Gazyva) and bendamustine compared with bendamustine alone, according to findings of the phase III GADOLIN study (click here, to view more).

In multiple myeloma elotuzumab and carfilzomib (Kyprolis) were shown to improve PFS versus standard treatments in the phase III ELOQUENT-2 and ENDEAVOR trials, respectively (click here, to view more).

Adding palbociclib (Ibrance) to standard fulvestrant more than doubled PFS in pretreated patients with HR-positive, HER2-negative breast cancer in the phase III PALOMA-3 trial (click here, to view more).

Goods news was also presented in soft tissue sarcoma (STS), where both eribulin (Halaven) and trabectedin were shown to improve outcomes in the difficult-to-treat disease (click here, to view more).

The meeting was not without its usual share of exciting results for emerging treatments, as well, and we cover several in this issue, including atezolizumab (MPDL3280A) and MEDI4736 in lung cancer, nivolumab in hepatocellular carcinoma, and pembrolizumab (Keytruda) in head and neck cancer (click here, to view full coverage).

The meaning of these and other ASCO data will continue to be interpreted in the months ahead and we look forward to covering the ongoing developments for you. As always, thank you for reading.