While there has been much progress made in recent years in the treatment of kidney cancer, all of it has been in the most common form of this disease, clear-cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC). Patients with the less common type of kidney cancer, non-clear-cell renal cell carcinoma (nccRCC), have usually been excluded from the large trials.…
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Half A Million Breast Cancer Deaths Avoided In Last 30years.
Progress in both detection and management of breast cancer may have saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of women over the past three decades, according to a new report. The cumulative number of breast cancer deaths that have been averted since 1989 ranges between 384,000 and 614,500, depending on different background mortality assumptions.…
Darolutamide : New Standard Of Care In Non Metastatic CRPC
Treatment with the investigational agent darolutamide (Bayer/Orion) significantly extended metastasis-free survival in patients with nonmetastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (nmCRPC), results from the phase 3 ARAMIS trial show. Darolutamide prolonged metastasis-free survival to 40.4 months, which was 22 months longer than observed with placebo, and the risk of metastasis or death from any cause was…
Checkpoint Inhibitor ‘Not Off Table’ For Patients With A History Of Autoimmune Disease.
This is Mark Kris from Memorial Sloan Kettering, speaking today about an emerging issue in our treatment of patients with lung cancers, and that is the use of immune checkpoint inhibitors in patients with a history of prior autoimmune disease. Many of us know that these patients were, by and large, excluded from clinical trials,…
‘Impressive’ Activity with BRAF/MEK Inhibitors in Biliary Cancer
Biliary tract cancers (BTCs) are rare, aggressive malignancies that generally have a poor prognosis, and are usually treated with chemotherapy. A new study shows that in a subgroup of these patients, individuals who have tumors with BRAF V600E mutations, treatment with a combination of targeted agents showed promising activity. The combination of drugs used — the BRAF kinase inhibitor…
Four Major Developments in Multiple Myeloma: ASH 2018
Frontline Monoclonal Antibody Therapy for Multiple Myeloma The first is the move toward monoclonal antibody therapy in frontline multiple myeloma. Earlier this year, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved daratumumab in combination with bortezomib, melphalan, and prednisone in patients who were ineligible for an autologous stem cell transplant, based on a clinical trial that demonstrated…
Happy New Year 2019
Ringing in the New Year is the moment for celebration, for spending time with friends and family, and for looking back. A lot can happen in a year and between the good, the bad and the ugly, this may seem like an understatement for most. Hereby, GDMeds wishing every day of the new year…
Cabozantinib Active in RAI-Refractory Thyroid Cancer
Cabozantinib (Cabometyx, Exelixis) has shown efficacy in the first-line treatment of radioactive iodine (RAI)–refractory differentiated thyroid carcinoma (DTC) and could offer an option in addition to the drugs approved for this indication, such as sorafenib (Nexavar, Bayer) and lenvatinib (Lenvima, Eisai). New data from a phase 2 study showed that patients with thyroid cancer that progressed after surgery and RAI achieved…
FDA Approved Pembrolizumab For Advanced Merkel Cell Carcinoma
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved pembrolizumab (Keytruda, Merck), a programmed cell death–ligand-1 (PD-L1) inhibitor, for the treatment of adult and pediatric patients with recurrent locally advanced or metastatic Merkel cell carcinoma (MCC). A rare and aggressive neuroendocrine skin cancer, MCC is often fatal. MCC is diagnosed in approximately 1600 people…
Immunotherapy Plus Targeted Drug in First-Line Kidney Cancer
Adding immunotherapy to a targeted agent significantly improved progression-free survival (PFS) when compared with a targeted agent alone in the first-line treatment of advanced renal cell carcinoma (RCC), suggests interim results from the JAVELIN Renal 101 trial. The combination therapy, comprised of the anti-programmed cell death ligand 1 (PD-L1) drug avelumab (Bavencio, EMD Serono) and the…
FDA Approved Novel ‘Tissue Agnostic’ Cancer Drug.
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted accelerated approval to larotrectinib (Vitrakvi, Loxo Oncology) for the treatment of adult and pediatric solid tumors that have a targetable biomarker known as a neurotrophic receptor tyrosine kinase (NTRK) gene fusion. In effect, the biomarker defines the cancer rather than an organ where the disease originated, as…
FDA OKs Targeted Agent Ivosidenib for Relapsed/Refractory AML
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved the targeted agent ivosidenib (Tibsovo, Agios Pharmaceuticals) for adults with relapsed or refractory acute myeloid leukemia (AML) who harbor isocitrate dehydrogenase-1 (IDH1) mutations. At the same time, the FDA has also approved the RealTime IDH1 Assay (Abbott Laboratories), a companion diagnostic used to detect specific mutations in the IDH1 gene in blood or bone…
