Articles related to Oncology, Medical

In this issue of JAMA Oncology, two groups investigate the immune response to SARS-CoV-2, by proxy of antibody assays, in patients with solid malignant neoplasms who were undergoing active cancer therapy. With the concern that patients with cancer may not mount a robust protective immune response to SARS-CoV-2 infection or vaccination, the studies attempt to discover what seropositivity can tell us.

In this JAMA Original Investigation, the researchers studied 19,529 patients with Medicare coverage who initiated first systemic therapy for advanced non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) using 1 of 4 regimens of checkpoint inhibitor immunotherapy, cytotoxic chemotherapy, and combined chemoimmunotherapy. The goal? To gauge the uptake and effectiveness of immunotherapy among older patients outside clinical trials.

Despite the pandemic interrupting trials and drug development in 2020, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) claims it is “full speed ahead” on the approval of novel cancer drug therapies. The authors of this Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) study wanted to verify these remarks, reviewing the FDA Hematology/Oncology Approvals website to ascertain all hematology/oncology drugs approved in 2020.

In this article from Blood Advances highlighted by helpful visual abstracts, two key points are discussed. First, patient-specific next-generation sequencing (NGS)-based measurable residual disease (MRD) monitoring using non-DTA mutations after allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation (alloHCT) is independently prognostic for relapse and survival. Second, the kinetics rather than a single time point should be further evaluated when DTA mutations are used for MRD monitoring after alloHCT.

In this interview with Dr. Richard Furman, Professor of Medicine at New York-Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medicine, the importance of the CLL14 study is highlighted. In addition, Dr. Furman discusses the best use of venetoclax and whether anti-CD20 agents really add to the benefit of venetoclax treatment and whether a policy of watch and wait is still beneficial for all patients. 

In this Original Report from the Journal of Clinical Oncology, the authors conducted a phase I trial of autologous CD19 CAR T cells in children and young adults (CAYAs) with relapsed or refractory B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (B-ALL) to discover whether the role for allogeneic hematopoietic stem-cell transplant (alloHSCT) following CD19-CAR T-cell therapy can improve long-term outcomes.