Oncology Times - OncTimes Talk

When the mucin-1 (MUC-1) vaccine tecemotide was added to standard-of-care neoadjuvant systemic therapy, investigators in Austria found improved long-term outcomes in women with early breast cancer. Individuals vaccinated with tecemotide had markedly longer distant recurrence-free and overall survival. This was in the randomized prospective ABCSG-34 trial presented at the 2024 ASCO Annual Meeting. Oncology Times reporter Peter Goodwin met up in Chicago with the lead study author, Christian F. Singer MD, a gynecologist specializing in breast cancer at the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and the Comprehensive Cancer Center of the Medical University of Vienna, in Vienna, Austria.

Not only can palliative care be delivered effectively by telehealth to patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer, it’s also as effective as face-to-face delivery by specialist clinicians, according to a study reported at the 2024 ASCO Annual Meeting. In addition, telehealth turned out to be more popular. For the Oncology Times podcast, OncTimesTalk, correspondent Peter Goodwin spoke with Joseph A. Greer, PhD, lead author of the study and Co-Director of the Cancer Outcomes Research and Education Program at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

The CARACO prospective, multi-institutional, Phase III trial, among patients with newly diagnosed advanced epithelial ovarian cancer, found that lymphadenectomy should be omitted in patients with clinically negative lymph nodes, as well as those undergoing neoadjuvant chemotherapy and interval complete surgery. This finding from the University of Nantes was reported at the 2024 ASCO Annual Meeting. The researchers noted this surgical de-escalation allows significant reduction of serious post-operative morbidity After the session, Oncology Times correspondent Peter Goodwin learned about more study details from Jean-Marc Classe, MD, PhD, Professor of Surgery in the Department of Surgical Oncology in the Institut de Cancérologie de l'Ouest and Nantes University in Western France.

A combination of two checkpoint inhibitors used as neoadjuvant therapy for macroscopic, resectable Stage III melanoma brought a highly statistically significant improvement over the standard of care: surgery followed by checkpoint inhibition (therapeutic lymph node dissection followed by adjuvant therapy with nivolumab, pembrolizumab or, in BRAFmut melanoma, dabrafenib + trametinib). This research was reported from the ASCO 2024 Annual Meeting and highlighted the NADINA trial from the Netherlands. After his session at ASCO, the lead author of NADINA, Christian U. Blank, MD, PhD, from the Netherlands Cancer Institute and Antoni van Leeuwenhook Hospital, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, met up with Oncology Times reporter Peter Goodwin to discuss the findings.

Primary results from ASC4FIRST trial, the first study in chronic myeloid leukemia comparing current standard-of-care frontline tyrosine kinase inhibitors with the novel agent asciminib in newly diagnosed patients, were reported at the 2024 ASCO Annual Meeting. First author Timothy Hughes MD, Consultant Hematologist with the Royal Adelaide Hospital, the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute, and the University of Adelaide in Australia, reported higher efficacy in terms of major molecular responses and lower toxicity with asciminib. After his talk in Chicago, he met up with Oncology Times reporter, Peter Goodwin.

Treatment with perioperative chemotherapy, with chemotherapy before and after surgery, brought superior outcomes for patients with locally advanced esophageal adenocarcinoma, in research reported to the 2024 ASCO Annual Meeting. Lead author Jens Höppner FAChirg, FACS, MD, Director of the Department of Surgery in the University Medical Center at the University of Bielefeld in Germany, spoke with Oncology Times reporter Peter Goodwin about his group’s comparison of neoadjuvant therapy using the CROSS (41.4 Gy plus carboplatin/paclitaxel) regimen followed by surgery, with the use of an alternative protocol: perioperative FLOT (5-FU/ leucovorin/oxaliplatin/docetaxel) and surgery, in which chemotherapy is given both before and after curative surgery.

Data from the DESTINY Breast06 trial using the antibody-drug conjugate trastuzumab deruxtecan to treat patients with estrogen receptor positive (HR+), human epidermal growth factor receptor-low (HER2-low), and HER2-ultralow breast cancer after endocrine therapy, show longer progression-free survival in comparison with standard chemotherapy.  After announcing the results at the 2024 ASCO Annual Meeting, first author Giuseppe Curigliano, MD, PhD, Director of Early Drug Development for the Innovative Therapies Division of the European Institute of Oncology, discussed the findings with Oncology Times correspondent Peter Goodwin

New data from the Phase III LAURA study, reported in Chicago at the ASCO 2024 Annual Meeting Plenary Session, suggest that the tyrosine kinase inhibitor osimertinib could become standard of care for treating patients whose unresectable locally advanced lung cancers test positive for mutated epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) and have no progression after definitive chemoradiotherapy. In Chicago, Oncology Times reporter Peter Goodwin met up with lead author of the LAURA study, Suresh S. Ramalingam MD, Executive Director of the Winship Cancer Institute at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta.

When the immune checkpoint inhibitor durvalumab was added to standard-of-care chemoradiation treatment for patients with limited-stage small-cell lung cancer, it brought a “statistically significant and clinically meaningful” improvement in overall and progression-free survival, compared to adding placebo. This was in data from the ADRIATIC study reported in the Plenary Session at the 2024 ASCO Annual Meeting in Chicago.   Peter Goodwin was there for Oncology Times, where he talked with the lead author of the new research, David Spigel, MD, Chief Scientific Officer at Sarah Cannon Research Institute in Nashville, TN.

An improvement over standard care in both efficacy and safety of a new combination regimen for treating Hodgkin lymphoma was discussed at the 2024 ASCO Annual Meeting in Chicago. The six-drug BrECADD regimen was compared with the high-achieving German-originated BEACOPP chemotherapy that has been widely adopted as standard of care. During the conference, Oncology Times reporter Peter Goodwin met up with Peter Borchmann, MD, PhD, the lead author of the new research and Chair of the German Hodgkin Study Group at the University Hospital of Cologne in Germany.