AACR 2019 Highlights

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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Treatment with gilteritinib (Xospata) significantly improved overall survival (OS) with less toxicity compared with chemotherapy in patients with relapsed or refractory acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and FLT3 mutation, according to the final results of ADMIRAL, a phase 3 clinical trial presented at the 2019 American Association for Cancer Research meeting. Read More ›

Immune checkpoint inhibitors represent a tremendous advance in the treatment of several types of cancers. Although approximately 20% to 25% of patients will have durable responses with these agents, it has been challenging to find biomarkers to identify who these patients are. Read More ›

Preclinical and clinical data support the potential for the investigational novel tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI) infigratinib for the treatment of different FGFR-driven tumor types, according to Sameek Roychowdhury, MD, PhD, Associate Professor, Medical Oncology, the Ohio State University, Columbus, who presented a poster with the preclinical results at the 2019 American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) meeting. Read More ›

The combination of the investigational MET inhibitor savolitinib plus the EGFR inhibitor osimertinib (Tagrisso) achieved encouraging responses in patients with MET-amplified, EGFR-positive non–small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and acquired, MET-driven resistance to previous therapies, with an acceptable side-effect profile. These findings represent interim results of 2 expansion cohorts of a phase 1b clinical trial presented at the 2019 American Association for Cancer Research meeting. Read More ›

Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy has had dramatic results in hematologic malignancies, but so far, getting CAR T-cells to work in solid tumors has proved elusive. That may be about to change if promising results from a phase 1 clinical trial are confirmed by further studies. The results of this pivotal study were presented at the 2019 American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) annual meeting. Read More ›

The investigational PI3K inhibitor umbralisib had encouraging activity as monotherapy in patients with relapsed or refractory marginal-zone lymphoma in an analysis of the phase 2 UNITY-NHL trial. Interim results were presented at the 2019 American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) meeting. Read More ›