In a phase 2 “basket” clinical trial, the combination of ipilimumab (Yervoy), a CTLA-4 inhibitor, and nivolumab (Opdivo), a PD-1 inhibitor, led to tumor shrinkage in 44% of patients with rare, aggressive, extrapancreatic high-grade neuroendocrine tumors (NETs), and the responses were durable. No responses were seen in low-grade tumors. These results come from the Dual Anti-CTLA-4 and Anti-PD-1 Blockade in Rare Tumors (DART) study, which was presented at the 2019 American Association for Cancer Research annual meeting, by Sandip P. Patel, MD, DART Clinical Study Chair, and Deputy Director, San Diego Center for Precision Immunotherapy, Moores Cancer Center, UC San Diego Health, La Jolla, CA.
Reduced-dose chemotherapy is as effective as full-dose chemotherapy in frail elderly patients with advanced gastroesophageal cancer, according to results of the phase 3 GO2 clinical trial presented at the 2019 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting. Lower doses of oxaliplatin plus capecitabine (OCap) led to similar survival but improved quality of life compared with higher doses of that regimen in this patient population.
Patients with metastatic urothelial cancer receive first-line treatment with platinum-based chemotherapy and second-line treatment with a checkpoint inhibitor. There is currently no approved third-line therapy for this malignancy. The investigational antibody-drug conjugate enfortumab vedotin may be a good choice for third-line therapy, based on the results of a phase 2 clinical trial presented at the 2019 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting.
Gilteritinib (Xospata), a recently approved FLT3 inhibitor, prolonged survival in patients with relapsed or refractory acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and an FLT3 mutation in the phase 3 ADMIRAL clinical trial. A new analysis presented at ASCO 2019 was focused on the impact of baseline co-mutations and FLT3-ITD allelic burden on overall response and on overall survival (OS) in patients with relapsed or refractory AML who received treatment with gilteritinib.
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