October 2020, Vol 11, No 5

PARP inhibition is moving on from breast and ovarian cancer to the treatment of patients with prostate cancer and BRCA1/2 mutation. Olaparib (Lynparza) reduced the risk for death by 31% versus enzalutamide (Xtandi) or abiraterone (Zytiga) in men with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC) and BRCA1 or BRCA2, and to a lesser extent ATM mutations, according to the final analysis of the phase 3 PROfound trial.
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What are the practical implications of a flurry of recent healthcare-related actions taken by Congress, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), and the White House? In summary, “Some can happen, some will take significant effort, but most are just political grandstanding as we get closer to the election,” said Jayson Slotnik, JD, MPH, Partner, Health Policy Strategies, Bethesda, MD, and moderator of the mid-August webcast from the Association for Value-Based Cancer Care.
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Patients with cancer and cancer treatment dynamics continue to bounce back toward baseline as of late summer 2020, reported experts at the Association for Value-Based Cancer Care August 20 webcast, which focused on economic trends in cancer care during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Leading global drug manufacturers have been called on to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic in a myriad of ways; several of their executives discussed those responses in a mid-August webcast from the Association for Value-Based Cancer Care.
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At the July 2020 AACR virtual meeting on COVID-19 and cancer, Solange Peters, MD, PhD, European Society for Medical Oncology President, and Head, Medical Oncology Department, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois, Lausanne, Switzerland, delivered the keynote address, providing an update on the COVID-19 and Cancer Consortium cohort study.
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The prognosis of older patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) has been poor, even after treatment with a hypomethylating agent. A previous phase 1b study of azacitidine (Vidaza) added to venetoclax (Venclexta) showed promising efficacy and duration of response in treatment-naïve patients with AML who were ineligible for chemotherapy.
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The safety and durability of responses to multitargeted inhibitors in thyroid cancer are at least partially limited by side effects. In all, 70% of patients with medullary thyroid cancer carry the RET mutation; RET fusions are rare in other types of thyroid cancer. The efficacy and safety of selective RET inhibition in patients with RET-altered thyroid cancer is unknown.
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The overall mortality for lung cancer has declined in the United States, but little is known about the mortality trends by lung cancer subtype, because death certificates do not record this information. To address this limitation in the data collection, the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) program has linked mortality records to incident cancer cases in all cancer types.
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Capmatinib (Tabrecta), a selective inhibitor of the mesenchymal-epithelial transition (MET) receptor, showed significant antitumor activity in patients with metastatic non–small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and gene mutations that lead to MET exon 14 skipping, according to the results of a recently published study.
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On July 24, 2020, the FDA accelerated the approval of brexucabtagene autoleucel (Tecartus; Kite Pharma), a CAR T-cell therapy, for the treatment of adults with mantle-cell lymphoma (MCL) whose disease has not responded to or has relapsed after other therapies. Brexucabtagene autoleucel is the first gene therapy FDA-approved specifically for the treatment of patients with MCL, a rare type of B-cell non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
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