Deepa Bhojwani recalled feeling lucky her 2-year-old cancer patient with covid-19 bounced back quickly after being seen for a fever in the emergency department at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. But in the months that followed, an unnerving thing happened. The toddler’s condition flip-flopped from sick to well to sick again Read more…
In its first clinical trial in patients with a hard-to-treat form of uterine cancer, a targeted drug that subjects tumor cells to staggering levels of DNA damage caused tumors to shrink in nearly one-third of patients, investigators at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute reported. Read More…
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will hold a public meeting of the Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee (ODAC) between April 27-29, 2021 to discuss accelerated approvals in oncology impacted as part of the Agency’s industry-wide review. On April 29, Bristol Myers Squibb will meet with the Committee to discuss Read more…
The authors of this case series evaluated the association between risk-reducing salpingo-oophorectomy (RRSO) and breast cancer risk in 876 families with pathogenic variant BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations. The cumulative risk of breast cancer in women without RRSO was 61% by age 70 years for women with the BRCA1 pathogenic variant Read more…
The FDA approved pembrolizumab for the first-line treatment of patients with metastatic or unresectable recurrent head and neck squamous cell carcinoma. The approval includes two indications: for use in combination with platinum and fluorouracil for all patients, and as a single agent for patients whose tumors express PD-L1 — with Read more…
The phase III KEYNOTE-119 study revealed no significant difference in outcomes with the use of pembrolizumab versus single-agent chemotherapy for metastatic triple-negative breast cancer. Nevertheless, a pre-planned exploratory analysis suggested that those patients with the highest tumor and immune cell expression of PD-L1 may benefit from this drug. The findings Read more…
In this large, international, phase III trial, patients with progressive metastatic triple-negative breast cancer were randomized to receive pembrolizumab or investigator’s choice of single-agent chemotherapy in the second- or third-line setting. Median overall survival was 9.9 months with pembrolizumab versus 10.8 months with chemotherapy. Survival remained similar between treatment groups Read more…
A preliminary exploratory analysis from part 2 of the phase 2/3 TYME-88-Panc trial (NCT03512756) of SM-88 (racemetyrosine) in patients with metastatic pancreatic cancer showed a correlation between mean daily step count during the first 2 weeks of treatment and self-reported quality of life (QoL), according to data reported at the Read more…
The Food and Drug Administration has scheduled a three-day virtual meeting in April to review six accelerated approvals given to cancer immunotherapies from Roche, Bristol Myers Squibb and Merck & Co. At the advisory panel, set for April 27 through 29, regulators, oncologists and patient advocates will discuss what the Read more…