IMMUNOTHERAPY

A therapy that provides an impressive and durable benefit has been mostly out of reach in the primary brain cancer space, particularly for glioblastoma.

The search for effective biomarkers is still one of the biggest challenges in cancer, said Janice M. Mehnert, MD.

Today, the field of melanoma is virtually unrecognizable from what it was not that long ago.

Immunotherapy may not phase out surgery and chemotherapy as standards of care in cancer, but oncolytic viruses may usher in a new age of treatment.

The management of medulloblastoma, the most common malignant brain cancer in children, has not changed in decades but breakthroughs are on the horizon.

Madhav Dhodapkar, MBBS, clinical research program leader, Hematology Program, Yale Cancer Center, discusses the evolving field of immuno-oncology and the significant benefits it stands to have for patients.

Across the fields of renal cell carcinoma, bladder cancer, and prostate cancer, immunotherapy agents are moving through the pipeline and impacting patient outcomes—some quicker than others.

The treatment paradigm of metastatic urothelial carcinoma was shaken up in May 2016 when the FDA approved the PD-L1 inhibitor atezolizumab for the treatment of patients with locally advanced or metastatic disease.

Atezolizumab proves to be non-toxic and shows major survival advantage in patients with metastatic urothelial bladder cancer.

Scientific breakthroughs can be difficult in a rare disease such as sarcoma, which makes up less than 1% of all adult cancers and comprises more than 50 subtypes.

Treatment with pembrolizumab led to a reduction of tumor size in 33% of patients with undifferentiated pleomorphic sarcoma and dedifferentiated liposarcoma.

Data from the phase I HD7 through HD11 trials proves promising enough to move on to phase II.

The FDA has placed a partial clinical hold on a planned pivotal trial examining NY-ESO SPEAR T-cell therapy in patients with myxoid round cell liposarcoma.

George D. Demetri, MD, senior vice president for Experimental Therapeutics at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and co-director of the Ludwig Center at Harvard, discusses the relevance of sarcoma in the converging worlds of targeted therapies and immuno-oncology.

Over the past several years, the FDA approval of several novel agents has revolutionized the treatment of patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer.

The FDA has approved the PD-1 inhibitor pembrolizumab as a second-line therapy for patients with recurrent or metastatic head and neck squamous cell carcinoma for those who have progression on a platinum chemotherapy. 

Blinatumomab almost doubles the overall survival of patients with relapsed/refractory acute lymphoblastic leukemia, according to Max Topp, MD.

A recent phase II trial examining nivolumab (Opdivo) in patients with anal cancer seeks to explore the biological makeup, and uncover potential biomarkers in anal cancer.

Although immunotherapies, such as nivolumab (Opdivo) and pembrolizumab (Keytruda), have generated great excitement in the field of squamous non-small cell lung cancer, a number of targeted agents are also gaining recognition.

There have been limited successes made in immunotherapy in the treatment of patients with prostate cancer so far, but progress is being made, explains Akash Patnaik, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of Medicine at the University of Chicago Medicine.

In 2012, the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer convened a worldwide consortium to validate the Immunoscore as a standardized assay for use in routine clinical settings.

Pembrolizumab (Keytruda) is associated with an exceptional overall response rate (ORR) in patients with relapsed/refractory Hodgkin lymphoma.

The FDA has agreed to review nivolumab under an accelerated timeframe for its potential as a treatment for patients with previously treated metastatic or recurrent squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck.

The FDA has granted nivolumab a breakthrough therapy designation for the treatment of patients with resectable locally advanced or metastatic urothelial carcinoma after the failure of a platinum-containing regimen.

Mark Ball, MD, chief urology resident, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, discusses the clinical, pathological, and genomic profiles of exceptional responders to anti-PD-1 therapy in renal cell carcinoma.

After just returning from the 2016 American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago, it was clear that there is a palpable excitement over recent progress in cancer research and therapeutic drug development.

An immunotherapy/antiangiogenesis combination proved to be safe and tolerable for patients with recurrent glioblastoma.

Breast cancer has traditionally not been viewed as immunogenic. There is now a growing body of evidence that immune infiltration has a prognostic role in al breast cancer subtypes, and predicts improved clinical outcome in triple-negative and human epidermal growth factor receptor 2-positive tumors.

The word "marker" is defined, in medical terms, as "something that serves to identify, predict, or characterize." A variation on this word, known as a biological marker, or biomarker (defined as a measurable indicator of a biological condition) takes this concept one step further.