OncTimes Talk Research Review May 2021

What’s in the OncTimesTalk, May 2021 Edition?

New clinical findings on:

Nivolumab in gastro-esophageal cancer, CDK4/6 inhibition for breast cancer, COVID-19 vaccination limitations, sitagliptin/graft-versus-host disease, breast cancer individualization, neo-adjuvant chemotherapy for rectal cancer.

Featuring:

Ronan Kelly (Austin TX), Erica Mayer (Boston MA), Sibylle Loibl (Frankfurt, Germany), Shabir Madhi (Johannesburg South Africa) and Thierry Conroy (Nancy, France).

Interviews in this edition:

Ronan J Kelly MD MBA, Baylor University Medical Center, Dallas

Adjuvant Nivolumab “Practice Changing” in Resected Gastroesophageal Cancer

Ronan Kelly tells OncTimesTalk about a big reduction in the risk of death, and doubling of median disease-free survival, from using nivolumab as adjuvant therapy for patients with esophageal, and gastro-esophageal junction, cancers after

chemoradiotherapy plus surgery in the placebo-controlled phase-three CheckMate 577 study.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2032125

Erica L. Mayer MD, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, MA

Palbociclib Added No Benefit to Breast Cancer Adjuvant Endocrine Therapy

Erica Mayer discusses the PALLAS study findings with OncTimesTalk that adding the CDK 4/6 inhibitor palbociclib to endocrine therapy failed to improve invasive disease-free survival among patients with early breast cancer despite its proven efficacy in metastatic disease.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2045(20)30642-2/fulltext

Breast Cancer: A Guide to Therapy Individualization 

Sibylle Loibl, Professor of Obstretrics and Gynaecology, University of Frankfurt, CEO and Chair, German Breast Group.

Sibylle Loibl discusses her expert panel’s findings with OncTimesTalk about optimizing the many powerful methods for managing breast cancer to individualize treatment. “Future research in breast cancer will focus not only on new drugs, but even more on the individualization of therapy for every single tumor in every single patient,” she wrote in “The Lancet”.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)32381-3/fulltext

Sherif S. Farag MD PHD, Director of the Stem Cell Transplant and Cellular Therapy, Melvin and Bren Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center, Indiana University School of Medicine, in Indianapolis

Sitagliptin Reduced Graft Versus Host Disease in Stem Cell Transplantation

A non-randomized 36-patient phase-two clinical study found a big reduction in acute graft-versus-host disease after adding the dipeptidyl peptidase-4 (DPP-4) inhibitor sitagliptin (a long established antiglycemic agent) to immunosuppression for allogeneic stem-cell transplantation.  Sherif Farag discusses the study findings with OncTimesTalk.

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2027372

Shabir A. Madhi PhD, Professor of Vaccinology and Director of the Vaccines & Infectious Diseases Analytics Research Unit at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, Co-Director of African Leadership in Vaccinology Expertise.

SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine Was Ineffective Against B.1.351 (“South African”) Variant

A “first-generation” vaccine for COVID-19 failed to prevent mild or moderate disease caused by the B.1.351 coronavirus variant in South Africa in a randomized, double-blind, controlled trial of the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine among relatively young adults. Shabir Madhi tells OncTimesTalk, however, that vaccination with such first-generation vaccines should still protect against severe disease and death from the new variant because T-cell responses had been preserved in the South African variant.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2102214

Thierry Conroy MD, Professor, Department of Medical Oncology, Institut de Cancérologie de Lorraine, 54519 Vandoeuvre-lès-Nancy, France

Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy Before Preoperative Chemoradiotherapy in Locally Advanced Rectal Cancer

A multi-center, randomized, open-label, phase-three trial has shown that outcomes for patients with rectal cancer can be improved still further by using neoadjuvant chemotherapy before the current standard of care (chemo-radiotherapy and surgery).  Professor Thierry Conroy, from the Cancer Institute in Nancy, gives OncTimesTalk the details on why they decided to try an additional treatment and the benefit it brought.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2045(21)00079-6/fulltext