Beesley VL et al. Support Care Cancer 2018; 26: 4133. doi:10.1007/s00520-018-4284-0

medwireNews  talks to Professor Dame Lesley Fallowfield and Dr Ethan Basch about the barriers to the routine incorporation of patient-reported outcomes in oncology clinical trials, and the changes that are happening.

Two articles published in The New England Journal of Medicine report on the clinical and patient-reported outcomes of the ProtecT trial’s assessment of three approaches for the management of localised prostate cancer detected by prostate-specific antigen testing.

Similarly, pooling data from the 12 studies that reported on progression-free survival (PFS) revealed a significant 48% lower risk for disease progression or death with cutaneous irAEs.

The combination of pembrolizumab and lenvatinib has durable antitumor activity and promising survival outcomes in treatment-naïve patients with advanced non-clear-cell renal cell carcinoma, say the KEYNOTE-B61 investigators.

Adding talazoparib to enzalutamide significantly improves the outcomes of untreated patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer, regardless of homologous recombination repair mutation status, shows the TALAPRO-2 trial.

Patients with HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer that is refractory or resistant to trastuzumab emtansine have significantly better outcomes with trastuzumab deruxtecan than a physician’s choice treatment, shows the phase 3 DESTINY-Breast02 trial.

Cascone and colleagues highlight that the addition of ipilimumab to nivolumab plus chemotherapy “maintained an overall acceptable toxicity and allowed curative-intent surgery without adverse postoperative outcomes.”

The investigators summarize that their findings do not support nivolumab plus ipilimumab in the adjuvant RCC setting, and they conclude: “Factors that might have contributed to our reported outcomes include heterogeneity of the patient population studied, the dosing schedule and duration of treatment chosen in this trial, and decreased adverse event tolerability in the setting of adjuvant treatment for localised renal cell carcinoma.”

Furthermore, analysis of The Cancer Genome Atlas data suggested that carriage of this variant allele was also associated with improved survival outcomes, “inferring that, in addition to predisposing patients to [ICI] toxicity, B cell IL7 plays a role in the natural history of melanoma”, which “further highlights the potential therapeutic importance of this pathway”, the researchers comment.

As reported in JAMA Oncology , the risk of breakthrough SARS-CoV-2 infection 14 days after the second vaccine dose was significantly higher for people with versus without cancer, at an adjusted hazard ratio (HR) of 1.05.

People with cancer receiving immunotherapy or other anticancer treatments are at increased risk for adverse COVID-19 outcomes if they are also receiving immunosuppressive therapy, suggests a registry-based cohort study.

Authors: James Convill, Fiona Blackhall, Janelle Yorke, Corrine Faivre-Finn & Fabio Gomes Abstract Introduction Smoking cessation following lung cancer diagnosis is recommended to improve patient outcomes.

A meta-analysis has revealed a favorable association between immune checkpoint inhibitors as monotherapy and patient-reported outcomes and quality of life.

One patient – who received olaparib 100 mg twice daily – reported grade 2 treatment-related breast pain, fibrosis, and deformity at both the 1- and 2-year follow-ups.

The study authors therefore summarize: “[T]he long-term effect of SRS and WBRT is not consistently in favor of 1 modality over the other for each patient-reported outcome or cognitive test, which may mean that there is a population of patients who still may benefit from early use of WBRT.” medwireNews is an independent medical news service provided by Springer Healthcare Ltd. © 2022 Springer Healthcare Ltd, part of the Springer Nature Group JAMA Oncol 2022; doi:10.1001/jamaoncol.2022.5049