Romain Cohen, MD, PhD, of the Mayo Clinic and Sorbonne University, discusses a post-hoc analysis of phase III results from the CALGB/SWOG 80702 study, which showed that adding the number of tumor deposits, a negative prognostic factor, to the count of lymph node metastases may improve the accuracy of TNM staging (Abstract 10).
Afsaneh Barzi, MD, PhD, of the City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center and the University of Southern California, discusses reasons for the incomplete understanding of the molecular landscape of minority patients with cancer, lack of screening chief among them. This underrepresentation, Dr. Barzi says, is more marked in gastrointestinal malignancies than other solid tumors, and she recommends ways to improve the outlook.
Wasat Mansoor, MBChB, PhD, of The Christie NHS Foundation Trust, discusses phase III results from the KEYNOTE-590 trial, which showed no deterioration in health-related quality of life when pembrolizumab was added to chemotherapy in patients with metastatic and unresectable esophageal cancers (Abstract 168).
Talia Golan, MD, of the Oncology Institute, Sheba Medical Center, discusses phase III results from the POLO trial, which explored the question of whether maintenance olaparib could improve overall and progression-free survival for patients with germline BRCA-mutated metastatic pancreatic cancer (Abstract 378).
Matthew H.G. Katz, MD, of The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, discusses findings from the Alliance A021501 study, which showed that administering mFOLFIRINOX before surgery was associated with a favorable overall survival rate relative to historical data in patients with borderline resectable adenocarcinoma of the pancreas (Abstract 377).
Milind M. Javle, MD, of The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, discusses phase II study results showing that the novel tyrosine kinase inhibitor infigratinib may prove to be effective in treating patients with advanced cholangiocarcinoma harboring an FGFR2 gene fusion or rearrangement (Abstract 265).
