Articles

As part of the Association for Value-Based Cancer Care’s COVID-19 Impact on Cancer Care and Road to Recovery webcast series, Lillie Shockney, RN, BSN, MAS, HON-ONN-CG, led a panel of experts who reviewed some of the valuable lessons learned, and discussed ongoing challenges that nurses will continue to face as they strive to provide safe and effective care to patients with cancer.

PARP inhibition is moving on from breast and ovarian cancer to the treatment of patients with prostate cancer and BRCA1/2 mutation. Olaparib (Lynparza) reduced the risk for death by 31% versus enzalutamide (Xtandi) or abiraterone (Zytiga) in men with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC) and BRCA1 or BRCA2, and to a lesser extent ATM mutations, according to the final analysis of the phase 3 PROfound trial.

Early locoregional therapy with surgery and radiation does not improve overall survival (OS) in women with newly diagnosed stage IV breast cancer and an intact primary tumor compared with systemic therapy alone, according to the results of the randomized ECOG-ACRIN E2108 phase 3 clinical trial.

Oral relugolix given daily is superior to standard androgen-deprivation therapy (ADT) with leuprolide in men with advanced prostate cancer, according to the results of the phase 3 HERO study. In June, the FDA granted a priority review for relugolix, an oral gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) antagonist, for the treatment of advanced prostate cancer.

Asingle infusion of the investigational agent lifileucel—an immunotherapy using cryopreserved autologous tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs)—induced responses in more than 33% of patients with advanced melanoma whose disease progressed with multiple previous therapies, including PD-1 and BRAF/MEK inhibitors.

Cancer health disparities remain a challenge in the United States, despite some strides being made to reduce these disparities, according to a new report from the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) that was released in a virtual presentation on September 16, 2020.

One question on oncologists’ minds recently is whether treatment with immune checkpoint inhibitors in patients with cancer has a negative effect on COVID-19 disease. So far, the data have not shown a deleterious effect, but the definitive answer is unknown.

During the July 2020 AACR virtual meeting on COVID-19 and cancer, Solange Peters, MD, PhD, European Society for Medical Oncology President, and Head, Medical Oncology Department, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois, Lausanne, Switzerland, delivered the keynote address, providing an update on the COVID-19 and Cancer Consortium cohort study.

“COVID-19 is more than just the common cold. It represents a perpetual challenge for which we have to be perpetually prepared,” stated Anthony S. Fauci, MD, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), in his keynote lecture at the July 2020 AACR virtual meeting on COVID-19 and cancer. Dr Fauci has been Director of NIAID for 36 years.

A real-world analysis showed that adjuvant immunotherapy in patients with stage III melanoma improved survival, but that only approximately 33% of eligible patients received such adjuvant therapy after ipilimumab (Yervoy) was approved by the FDA for this indication.