The use of immune checkpoint inhibitors is not associated with excess toxicity in people living with HIV and a concomitant diagnosis of cancer, indicate real-world results.

Men with HIV-associated germ cell cancer have similar long-term survival outcomes to HIV-negative men with GCC, show results from an international collaborative study.

Phase 2 trial results point to the feasibility of treatment with the PD-L1 inhibitor durvalumab in people with advanced solid cancer and controlled type 1 HIV infection.

Researchers highlight the “almost universal exclusion” of people living with HIV from clinical trials of immune checkpoint inhibitor therapies despite malignancy being the leading cause of morbidity and mortality in this population.

Older individuals with HIV and prostate cancer have worse outcomes than corresponding cancer patients without HIV, according to a large database study from the USA.

The HIV protease inhibitor nelfinavir plus concurrent chemoradiotherapy has shown acceptable toxicity and promising efficacy in unresectable, stage IIIA/B non-small-cell lung cancer in a phase I/II trial.

Treatment with chemotherapy and/or radiotherapy is associated with a reduction in CD4 count in adults with HIV and cancer, relative to surgery or other therapy, and this in turn is associated with an increased risk for death, US study findings indicate.

Immune checkpoint inhibitor therapy is well tolerated by patients with HIV infection and advanced-stage cancer and does not appear to adversely affect HIV viral load or CD4 cell count, suggest results of a systematic data review.

A database analysis reported at the ESMO 2018 Congress in Munich, Germany, points to the feasibility of using immune checkpoint inhibitors in people living with HIV who develop cancer.

People with HIV infection are nearly 20 times more like to develop anal cancer than those in the general population, study findings indicate.

“A diagnosis of prostate cancer may affect same-sex partners differently, and these couples could be concerned about prostate cancer in the context of human immunodeficiency virus or other sexually transmitted infections.”

Jörg Vehreschild (Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany) and co-authors note that their results are in contrast to a recent report showing an increased risk for community-acquired pneumonia in opioid-treated individuals with HIV.

Presenting data from the CheckMate 817 study at the IASLC World Conference on Lung Cancer 2019 in Barcelona, Spain, Fabrice Barlesi (Aix-Marseille Université, France) showed that treatment-related adverse events (TRAEs) of any grade occurred in 67% of 198 patients with an ECOG PS of 2 or an ECOG PS of 0–1 plus asymptomatic untreated brain metastases, hepatic or renal impairment, or HIV.

By contrast, just 5.9% HIV infections were previously undiagnosed.

However, the SAUL study was open to a broader range of patients than the IMvigor211 trial, including those with nonmeasurable disease, an ECOG performance status of 2, or stable central nervous system metastases, as well as individuals requiring ongoing steroid therapy or renal dialysis, and those with HIV infection or autoimmune disease.

Epoetin alfa-epbx may also be used for patients in other settings, such as anemia associated with chronic kidney disease or the anti-HIV therapy zidovudine, or to reduce the need for allogeneic red blood cell transfusion in surgery.

Two phase II trials evaluating the combination of cetuximab and chemoradiotherapy in anal carcinoma patients, with or without HIV infection, find that although cetuximab addition is associated with lower locoregional failure rates than reported historically, it comes with a toxicity cost.