Articles related to Hematology/Oncology

The ECOG-ACRIN E1412 study demonstrated a potential clinical benefit of adding lenalidomide to R-CHOP (rituximab plus cyclophosphamide, doxorubicin, vincristine, and prednisone) (R2CHOP) in newly diagnosed patients regardless of cell-of-origin (COO) and in patients with activated b-cell-like (ABC) diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL). Although the results are not practice changing, they support further studies of lenalidomide and/or novel lenalidomide analogues in frontline therapy of DLBCL.

From the pages of Oncology Times comes the latest approvals, designations, and new indications from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for oncology drugs. Stories include new approvals in multiple myeloma, esophageal or gastroesophageal junction (GEJ) carcinoma, non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), anaplastic lymphoma, and more.

The FDA’s Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee will hold a public meeting from April 27 to 29, 2020, to reevaluate six treatments that were previously granted accelerated approval and have since reported results that failed to verify clinical benefit. The six indications to be discussed include atezolizumab (two indications), pembrolizumab (three indications), and nivolumab (one indication).

The FDA announced a trial hold after two participants with sickle cell disease (SCD) in the LentiGlobin gene therapy trials developed AML and MDS. According to bluebird bio, the manufacturer of LentiGlobin products, the company was unable to find any cancer cells in the patient’s bone marrow and has asked the FDA for permission to resume clinical trials.

In this Original Investigation from JAMA Oncology, the authors seek to discover the characteristics that define modern randomized clinical trials (RCTs) in oncology and whether they differ from characteristics of RCTs from the preceding decades, as concerns have emerged regarding the use of putative surrogate end points, such as progression-free survival (PFS) and marginal effect sizes.

The data, concluded in a report posted to the preprint server medRxiv, support prioritization of cancer patients for an early (21-day) second dose of the BNT162b2 vaccine, as barely one-quarter of patients with cancer obtained protection (28% immune efficacy rate, including 13% in patients with blood cancers) against COVID-19 after one dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.