OncLive News Network On Location: ESMO 2019 Day 1

Today-

We are on site at the Fira Gran Via in Barcelona, Spain, at the 2019 ESMO Congress!

We’ll be recapping some of the top news presented each day during the meeting, and soon we’ll speak with Dr Toni Choueri on some exciting studies being presented in renal cell carcinoma and a couple other genitourinary cancer abstracts, as well as Dr Omid Hamid on some pivotal melanoma trials.

Welcome to OncLive News Network! I’m Gina Columbus.

In hepatocellular carcinoma, results of two clinical trials showed that patients with unresectable hepatocellular carcinoma obtained clinically meaningful responses and had a statistically significant improvement in progression-free survival with the combination of atezolizumab and bevacizumab.

More than one-third of patients attained objective responses in an uncontrolled evaluation of the combination, three-fourths of which were ongoing with a median follow-up exceeding a year. A randomized trial showed that the combination reduced the risk of disease progression or death by 45% versus atezolizumab monotherapy.

Collectively, the studies provided a clear signal to proceed to phase III evaluation, but experts noted that there are several questions with the data that require answers.

More than one-third of patients with previously treated locally advanced or metastatic cholangiocarcinoma with an FGFR2 rearrangement or fusion had durable objective responses to treatment with pemigatinib, a selective oral inhibitor of FGFR1, 2, and 3.

The findings from the open-label, single-arm phase II FIGHT-202 trial showed an objective response rate of 35.5% in 107 patients with FGFR2 fusions/rearrangements along with a median duration of response of 7.5 months. No responses observed in the 20 patients enrolled with other FGF/FGFR genetic alterations in another cohort, or in 18 patients with no FGF/FGFR alterations.

In the first cohort, the higher ORR translated into a longer median progression-free survival of 6.9 months versus 2.1 months in the second cohort and 1.7 months in the third cohort.

Overall survival data were immature at the time of March 22, 2019 data cutoff. However, with a median duration of follow-up of 15.4 months and a median duration of treatment of 7.2 months, the median OS was 21.1 months in the cohort with FGFR2 fusions/rearrangements.

In non—small cell lung cancer, an interim survival analysis of the phase III IMpower 110 study showed that single-agent atezolizumab improved overall survival versus platinum-based chemotherapy as a first-line treatment of patients with wild-type disease wirh at least 50% expression of PD-L1 on tumor cells or at least 10% expression on tumor-infiltrating immune cells.

At a median follow-up of 15.7 months, the median OS was 20.2 months in patients randomized to atezolizumab versus 13.1 months in those who had platinum-based chemotherapy.

The OS testing boundary was not crossed in the TC2/3 or IC2/3 wild-type population, so OS was not formally tested in this population as well as in the TC1/2/3 and IC1/2/3 populations.

Updated findings of the phase III SPARTAN trial showed that apalutamide in combination with androgen deprivation therapy demonstrated a 25% reduction in the risk of death compared with placebo/ADT in patients with nonmetastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer.

At a median 41 months of follow-up, results showed that the median overall survival was not reached in either arm, favoring apalutamide, with a P value of .0197. However, due to a prespecified P value boundary of .0121, these data were not found to be statistically significant.

The data from the analysis also favored apalutamide regarding time to chemotherapy and PFS2.

Finally, results of the randomized phase II BAROCCO study showed that the combination of cediranib and olaparib is effective in heavily pretreated patients with platinum-resistant ovarian cancer, with an advantage of an oral administration and good tolerability.

Moreover, the continuous schedule of cediranib and olaparib showed a promising trend towards improved progression-free survival compared with weekly paclitaxel, especially in the BRCA wild-type population.

That’s all for today. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s OncLive News Network: On Location, where we will sit down with Drs Suresh Ramalingam and David Spigel on lung cancer studies.

Thank you for watching OncLive News Network! I’m Gina Columbus.