Jennifer Fink

This past year, 2020, will go down as a practice-changing one for the treatment of esophageal cancer, said Yelena Y. Janjigian, MD.

In the future, scientists may identify additional actionable alternations, allowing clinicians to target various subsets of pancreatic cancer more precisely.

Until recently, few options existed for patients with HER2-positive breast cancer who progressed on earlier lines of therapy. Recent approvals of 3 drug combinations offer new tools that may prolong life and control brain metastases across lines of therapy.

Advances in targeted therapies show encouraging activity as treatment for tough-to-target driver alterations in non–small cell lung cancer emerge, according to data presented at the 2019 ASCO Annual Meeting. The discovery of additional oncogenic drivers and promising targeted therapies means that certain patients will receive treatments that produce favorable outcomes based on their disease characteristics.

Checkpoint inhibitors are revolutionizing the treatment of patients with both squamous and nonsquamous non-small cell lung cancer, and are quickly assuming a predominant role, especially in the frontline setting, due to recent exciting results from large trials.<br /> &nbsp;

As checkpoint inhibition is increasingly being utilized beyond the scope of clinical trials, it&rsquo;s essential that community-based oncologists and physicians learn how to quickly diagnose and treat immune-related adverse events.

Hyperprogressive disease (HPD) after immunotherapy treatment may not be as rare of a phenomenon as previously thought. A recent multicenter, retrospective analysis of 242 patients with advanced non&ndash;small cell lung cancer&nbsp;(NSCLC) found that 16% of patients developed hyperprogression during anti&ndash;PD-1/ PD-L1 treatment.¹ The study, which was presented at the 2017 ESMO Annual Congress, is one of the latest to highlight the risk of hyperprogression.