August 2020, Vol 11, Special Issue: Payers' Perspectives in Oncology

“COVID-19 has been like a 9/11 moment in healthcare,” said Michael Kolodziej, MD, Senior Advisor, ADVI Health, at the Association for Value-Based Cancer Care (AVBCC) July 28, 2020, webcast. “We don’t have a playbook. It’s required us to rethink.”
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Early locoregional therapy with surgery and radiation does not improve overall survival (OS) in women with newly diagnosed stage IV breast cancer and an intact primary tumor compared with systemic therapy alone, according to the results of the randomized ECOG-ACRIN E2108 phase 3 clinical trial.
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Pembrolizumab (Keytruda) in combination with chemotherapy demonstrated a statistically significant and clinically meaningful improvement in progression-free survival (PFS) compared with chemotherapy alone as a first-line treatment for patients with metasstatic triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) whose tumors express PD-L1.
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Cellular therapy is becoming an attractive option for heavily pretreated patients with relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma.
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There is a new standard of care in the first-line treatment setting for the subset of patients with advanced colorectal cancer (CRC) that is associated with microsatellite instability-high (MSI-H) or mismatch repair-deficient (dMMR), according to data presented at the ASCO 2020 virtual annual meeting.
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The first-line immunotherapy combination of nivolumab (Opdivo) and low-dose ipilimumab (Yervoy) continues to show robust, durable clinical benefit, with a deepening of response, in patients with microsatellite instability high (MSI-H) or mismatch repair-deficient (dMMR) metastatic colorectal cancer (CRC), according to results presented at the ASCO 2020 virtual annual meeting.
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Interim analysis of the phase 3 JAVELIN Bladder 100 clinical trial showed that maintenance therapy with the PD-L1 inhibitor avelumab (Bavencio) plus best supportive care significantly prolonged overall survival (OS) versus best supportive care alone in patients with advanced urothelial carcinoma whose disease did not progress with first-line platinum-based chemotherapy.
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Targeted therapy with the Bruton tyrosine kinase (BTK) inhibitor acalabrutinib (Calquence), which is currently approved for the treatment of patients with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, has demonstrated durable remissions in treatment-naïve patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), according to the long-term data from the phase 2 CLL-001 study, which were presented at the ASCO 2020 virtual annual meeting.
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Since March 2020, Cancer Support Community has broken records for the number of calls coming into its national network, said Elizabeth Franklin, LGSW, ACSW, Executive Director of the Cancer Policy Institute and Co-Chair of the Policy and Advocacy Committee of the Academy of Oncology Nurse & Patient Navigators (AONN+), in a webinar of the Association for Value-Based Cancer Care (AVBCC) on COVID-19.
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According to long-term follow-up data presented at the ASCO 2020 annual meeting, anti-CD19 chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy has demonstrated ongoing durable remissions lasting up to 113 months for follicular lymphoma, 99 months for chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), and 97 months for diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) and primary mediastinal large B-cell lymphoma (PMBCL).
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