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September 2019, Vol 9, No 9

How many times over the course of your career have you thought about joining a professional organization? With only so much time, energy, and resources to go around, it is important to be selective and choose associations that will meet your professional needs, work within your schedule, and add value to your professional life.

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Reprogramming patients’ immune cells to treat their cancer has become the front line of cancer therapy, with chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy now approved by the FDA for several blood cancers. But translating this success to solid tumors remains a challenge. At the 2019 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting, Gianpietro Dotti, MD, Cancer Cellular Immunotherapy Program, Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, discussed efforts to extend the application of CAR T-cell therapy to solid tumors.

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Expanded data from an early phase 1/2 clinical trial showed that treatment with repotrectinib, an investigational tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI) with potent selectivity against tumors with ROS1 rearrangement, induced a response in 9 of 11 patients with TKI-naïve, ROS1-fusion–positive non–small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Read Article ›

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.

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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.

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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.

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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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On July 30, 2019, the FDA approved darolutamide (Nubeqa; Bayer) for the treatment of patients with nonmetastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer.

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On August 15, 2019, the FDA granted accelerated approval to entrectinib (Rozlytrek; Genentech) for the treatment of patients aged ≥12 years with solid tumors that have a neurotrophic tyrosine receptor kinase (NTRK) gene fusion without a known acquired resistance mutation; are metastatic or where surgical resection is likely to result in severe morbidity; and have progressed after treatment or have no satisfactory standard therapy.

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