IMMUNOTHERAPY

Lung Cancer

The Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey has announced 2 new additions to its team of oncology leaders. Wadih Arap, MD, PhD, will serve as the new director of the Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey at University Hospital, and Renata Pasqualini, PhD, will serve as the chief of the Division of Cancer Biology in the Department of Radiation Oncology at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School.

Jean-Charles Soria, MD, PhD, will be honored with the Targeted Anticancer Therapies 2018 Honorary Award for cancer drug development. Soria has played a large part in cancer drug development across molecular targeted agents, precision medicine, and immunotherapy for the last 15 years.

Even as immunotherapy grows more popular as a treatment for solid tumors, physicians are racing to identify patients with the molecular subtypes, rather than the disease, who will derive the most benefit.

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

<strong>IN THIS ISSUE, INVESTIGATORS FROM</strong> Emory Winship Cancer Institute describe their experience with the so-called &ldquo;abscopal effect,&rdquo; which describes the ability of locally delivered radiation therapy to trigger distant antitumor effects. R. H. Mole, BM, FRCP, first coined the term abscopal effect as &ldquo;an action at a distance from the irradiated volume but within the same organism&rdquo; in 1953.

The rising costs of drugs continue to impede cancer program growth, and new technology remains a boon and a bane, depending on its utility for expanding practice capability or its inflexibility to needs, according to the 2017 Trending Now in Cancer Care Survey from the Association of Community Cancer Centers, based in Rockville, Maryland.

The prognosis for patients with metastatic non&ndash;small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is poor.&nbsp;However, with recent trials showing improved overall survival with checkpoint inhibitors compared with standard chemotherapy, disease management is changing.

Updated findings from the phase III KEYNOTE-045 trial confirmed the benefit of&nbsp;pembrolizumab (Keytruda) compared with chemotherapy in pretreated patients with locally advanced or recurrent urothelial cancer. Two-year follow-up of the trial presented at the 2018 Genitourinary Cancers Symposium demonstrated that overall survival was improved with pembrolizumab.

Based on data from part 1a of the phase III CheckMate-227 trial, nivolumab (Opdivo) and&nbsp;ipilimumab (Yervoy) in combination show improved progression-free survival (PFS) versus with chemotherapy in treatment-na&iuml;ve patients with high tumor mutation burden (TMB) non&ndash;small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

Arjun Balar, MD, recently shared the treatment considerations and decisions he makes when treating patients with advanced bladder cancer.

Multiple Myeloma

The emerging arena of checkpoint inhibitors and immunotherapy in the treatment of urothelial carcinomas is explored and discussed.

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.

The overwhelming majority of patients with cancer who appear to progress after they begin immunotherapy will never respond. They will continue to progress, just as quickly as they would with no treatment and just as predicted by the Response Evaluation Criteria in Standard Tumors (RECIST) criteria that have long guided most trial evaluations and many treatment decisions.

An extension in overall survival (OS) with the combination of nivolumab (Opdivo) and ipilimumab (Yervoy) has completely changed the standard of care for patients with metastatic renal cell carcinoma (mRCC), Thomas Powles, MD, MBBS, MRCP, told audience members during the 9th European Multidisciplinary Meeting on Urological Cancers.<br /> &nbsp;

Eli Lilly and Company has announced that Kimberly L. Blackwell, MD, a pioneer in breast cancer research, will serve as its vice president of early phase development and immuno-oncology. She will begin her new role on March 12, 2018.<br /> &nbsp;