Staff Writer, Oncology Specialty Group

For patients with early breast cancer, peripheral neurotoxicity is an unfortunate side effect of treatment with taxanes, but there may be a silver lining.

The multi-targeted kinase inhibitor sorafenib, approved to treat kidney and liver cancer, may also benefit patients with metastatic breast cancer.

The RANK ligand inhibitor denosumab was better than the standard-of-care bisphosphonate, zoledronic acid in breast cancer patients with bone metastases.

Cancer patients are at high risk for venous thromboembolism (VTE), a leading cause of death in patients with cancer. Fixed-dose dabigatran may be a replacement for warfarin in the treatment of VTE, according to results of the large Phase III RE-COVER trial.

Even though imatinib (Gleevec) is a highly effective drug for chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) and the standard of care for newly diagnosed patients, a phase III study presented at a late-breaking news session showed that nilotinib (Tasigna) was superior as first-line therapy. This conclusion was based on rates of molecular and cytogenetic response.

Treatment with 8 cycles of CHOEP-R (cyclophosphamide, vincristine, doxorubicin, prednisone, etoposide, rituximab)-14 achieved excellent interim results in young, high-risk patients with previously untreated aggressive B-cell lymphoma, while the comparator arm of intensified CHOEP-R-21 followed by autologous stem cell transplant (“MegaCHOEP-R) was inferior and had greater toxicity.

Bendamustine (Treanda) plus rituximab (Rituxan; B/R) was superior to CHOP plus rituximab (CHOP-R) as first-line therapy of indolent lymphoma and mantle cell lymphoma in a multicenter, randomized, controlled trial of the German Study Group on Indolent Lymphoma (StiL). At an oral presentation at the 51st ASH Annual Meeting, experts agreed that this study may be practice-changing.

Lenalidomide (Revlimid) has promising anti-tumor activity in aggressive B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL), with a predictable toxicity profile. Results of an international phase II study suggest that lenalidomide should be studied in combination with other regimens in the treatment of the various subtypes of aggressive NHL, including diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL), transformed lymphoma, follicular grade III lymphoma, and mantle cell lymphoma (MCL), according to Thomas E. Witzig, MD, Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, Rochester, MN, who presented results of this study at the 51st ASH Annual Meeting.

Single-agent pixantrone, an investigational agent, showed encouraging third-line responses, duration of responses, and progression-free survival (PFS) compared with other single-agent chemotherapies in patients with relapsed aggressive non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) in the phase III, randomized, open-label, multicenter EXTEND trial. In the study, patients with relapsed/refractory NHL treated with pixantrone achieved significant increases in complete response (CR) and overall response (ORR) and demonstrated a positive trend in overall survival (OS) compared with other chemotherapy agents, according to Ruth Pettengell, MD, of St. Georges Hospital in London, who presented these results at a poster session. “An anthracycline with reduced cardiotoxicity that can be used for salvage therapy of aggressive NHL meets a significant unmet medical need,” she said.

Omacetaxine (Omapro) achieved durable hematologic and cytogenetic responses in patients with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) who failed treatment with imatinib (Gleevec). All patients in this phase II/III study had developed the T3151 mutation, which confers resistance to imatinib and to the second-generation tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) nilotinib (Tasigna) and dasatinib (Sprycel).