Articles related to CHEMOTHERAPY

In a study of parenteral cancer drug pricing at 61 NCI-designated cancer centers, median price markups on 25 commonly used drugs ranged from approximately 120% to 630% over acquisition cost. The paper’s authors recommend public policy prohibiting excessive markup on parenteral chemotherapies as a means to reduce unnecessary financial burden on patients.

“For patients with T1cN1-2 or T2-4N0 (stage II or III), early-stage TNBC, the Panel recommends use of pembrolizumab (200 mg once every 3 weeks or 400 mg once every 6 weeks) in combination with neoadjuvant chemotherapy, followed by adjuvant pembrolizumab after surgery.”

Compared to chemotherapy alone, adebrelimab plus chemotherapy nearly doubled 2-year OS and more than tripled 1-year PFS in patients with extensive-stage SCLC, according to results presented earlier this month at the AACR Annual Meeting 2022. The phase 3 CAPSTONE-1 study evaluated adebrelimab in combination with carboplatin plus etoposide, as first-line treatment for ES-SCLC.

Predictive biomarkers are needed to identify patients with oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma (OPSCC) that could enjoy treatment de-escalation, with the attendant reduction in incidence of acute and late toxicities. In an observational study of consecutive patients with patients with oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma, pretreatment absolute lymphocyte count was predictive for 5-year overall survival. It also predicted benefit from the use of concurrent cisplatin chemotherapy.

The phase 3 KEYNOTE-048 trial compares pembrolizumab with or without concurrent chemotherapy to cetuximab-chemotherapy in patients with recurrent or metastatic head and neck SCC. Patients were evaluated in subgroups based on PD-L1 expression. In median survival, pembrolizumab + chemotherapy outperformed cetuximab + chemotherapy in all patient subgroups regardless of PD-L1 expression. In the PD-L1 CPS 1-19 subgroup, pembrolizumab alone slightly outperformed cetuximab + chemotherapy. In the PD-L1 CPS < 1 subgroup median survival was significantly lower with pembrolizumab alone.

The BILCAP study established capecitabine as the adjuvant standard of care for patients after curatively resected biliary tract cancer (BTC). This publication presents the long-term data of that study. In the intention-to-treat analysis, the median OS was 49.6 months in the capecitabine group compared with 36.1 months in the observation group.