CancerNetwork®’s Week in Review: April 19, 2021
Take a look back at some of the important news and notes from last week in the world of oncology, featuring articles about the virtual AACR Annual Meeting 2021, breast cancer, prostate cancer, and lung cancer.
Each Monday, CancerNetwork® highlights the most important content from the previous week in oncology news.
Among the top news from last week are a number of oral abstract and poster presentations from the recent American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting 2021, held virtually in April 9 through 14.
Limited Efficacy, Manageable Safety Profile Found With TAS-117 to Treat Ovarian and Breast Cancer
TAS-117 showed limited clinical efficacy in treating patients with ovarian cancer harboring PIK3CA E545K mutations and in those with breast cancer harboring PIK3CA H1047R and Akt1E17K mutations.
Findings from the single-center, phase 2 K-BASKET trial (NCT03017521) conducted at Yonsei Cancer Center in Seoul, South Korea, were presented in a poster during the 2021 AACR Annual Meeting. These data were also published online in Investigational New Drugs in March 2021.
During a presentation at the AACR Annual Meeting 2021, Ben L. Kong, PharmD, described the SMMART program, which pairs genetic and clinical information to find the best therapies for patients with breast cancer who progress on standard therapies.
Compared with DNA sequencing alone, a multi-omics approach to personalized therapy that incorporates information about actionable oncogenic drivers with critical biological data was shown to be feasible in the metastatic breast cancer setting.
Neratinib Plus Fulvestrant Combination Does Not Meet Efficacy Criteria for Metastatic Breast Cancer
The clinical benefit rate of the neratinib (Nerlynx) plus fulvestrant combination treatment did not meet the predefined efficacy threshold, but was active in heavily pretreated patients with estrogen receptor-positive, metastatic breast cancer.
Adult patients with HER2 nonamplified metastatic breast cancer who were positive for activating HER2 by CLIA tumor tissue or ctDNA sequencing were eligible for the study. There were no limits on the number of prior lines of therapy.
Phase 2 data found that the combination of nivolumab (Opdivo) plus ipilimumab (Yervoy) demonstrated significant antitumor activity for patients with mCRPC.
The phase 2 NEPTUNES trial (NCT03061539) also demonstrated a safety profile that was consistent with previous research investigating this combination treatment regimen.
Neoadjuvant Nivolumab Plus Chemo Improves Pathological Complete Response in Resectable NSCLC
The CheckMate-816 trial (NCT02998528) is the first positive phase 3 trial demonstrating a significant improvement in pathologic response with neoadjuvant immunotherapy plus chemotherapy in resectable non–small cell lung cancer.
Moreover, the regimen did not decrease the ability to perform surgery. With this, the CheckMate-816 study is the first positive phase 3 trial to demonstrate a significant improvement in pathologic response with neoadjuvant immunotherapy plus chemotherapy in resectable NSCLC.
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