Due to the advances in treatment options for metastatic gastric cancer in recent years, oncology physicians and nurses can individualize treatment selection for patients by considering pathologic and molecular characteristics and emerging efficacy and safety data on novel therapies. Baseline data collected from i3 Health's continuing medical education (CME)/nursing continuing professional development (NCPD)–approved visiting faculty meeting series titled Challenges and Opportunities in Metastati...

A new study has demonstrated that durvalumab (Imfinzi®, AstraZeneca) improves survival for patients with stage III, unresectable non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) whose disease has not progressed after chemoradiotherapy. Durvalumab, an intravenously administered immune checkpoint inhibitor, was approved in February by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a standard-of-care treatment for this indication. It works by blocking programmed cell death ligand 1 (PD-L1), a protein fo...

Researchers have developed a new cancer vaccine platform that enhances the efficacy of oncolytic viruses designed to activate the body's immune response against cancer cells. Cytotoxic T-cell lymphocytes (CTLs), otherwise known as CD8+ cells, specialize in killing damaged or infected cells, including those with cancer. These cells are essential to antitumor immunity, and the quantity of tumor-specific CTLs found in tumor tissue has been linked to patient survival. Oncolytic viruses—viruses desig...

In this exclusive with i3 Health, Craig H. Moskowitz, MD, Professor of Medicine at the University of Miami and Physician-in-Chief at the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, and Kami Maddocks, MD, Associate Professor of Clinical Internal Medicine and Lymphoma Program Director at The James Cancer Hospital at The Ohio State University, share their perspectives on the management of relapsed/refractory classical Hodgkin lymphoma (HL) and the advances brought to the treatment of this disease by dev...

Immune checkpoint inhibition is a form of immunotherapy that blocks checkpoint proteins on immune cells, boosting the body's immune response against cancer cells. Checkpoint inhibitors such as pembrolizumab (Keytruda®, Merck), nivolumab (Opdivo®, Bristol-Myers Squibb), atezolizumab (Tecentriq®, Genentech), durvalumab (Imfinzi®, AstraZeneca), cemiplimab (Libtayo®, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc.), ipilimumab (Yervoy®, Bristol-Myers Squibb), and avelumab (Bavencio®, EMD Serono and Pfizer) have dem...

Some patients receiving immune checkpoint therapy develop mutations that impair antigen presentation, resulting in therapeutic resistance that renders the treatment useless. To combat this issue, scientists have been working to identify the role that enzymes play in cancer, as they are critical parts of the immune system. One of these enzymes, adenosine deaminase associated with RNA1 (ADAR1), is a stem cell enzyme that is responsible for marking human virus-like genes in order to avoid confusing...

​Researchers report that they have found a solution to the puzzle of why some patients with microsatellite instability (MSI)-high tumors respond well to immune checkpoint inhibitors, whereas others do not. Tumors that have defects in DNA mismatch repair are unable to fix certain types of DNA damage. This leads to sequence alterations in the DNA's microsatellites (repetitive genetic sequences in which DNA motifs ranging in length from one to six base pairs are reiterated as many as 50 times). The...

An observational study reports that broad-spectrum antibiotic treatment administered within 30 days prior to the commencement of immune checkpoint inhibitor therapy dramatically worsens overall survival and increases the risk of treatment-refractory disease. Published in JAMA Oncology, the prospective cohort study conducted at two tertiary academic referral centers enrolled 196 patients with cancer receiving immune checkpoint therapy for non-small cell lung cancer (119 patients), melanoma (38 pa...

​Unlike that of other gynecological malignancies, the etiology of cervical cancer is the human papillomavirus (HPV). This fact plays a role in how cervical cancer is perceived as immunogenic: T cells themselves are involved in the immune response and in the control of viral infections and the development of these tumors. In this discussion with i3 Health, Bradley Monk, MD, FACS, FACOG, Professor of Gynecologic Oncology at the University of Arizona and Creighton University, and Ramez Eskander, MD...

​Many patients with cancer experience infections requiring treatment. However, David Pinato, MD, MRes, PhD, and colleagues recently found that in patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), melanoma, and other tumor types, broad-spectrum antibiotic treatment administered within 30 days prior to the commencement of immune checkpoint inhibitor therapy dramatically worsened overall survival (2 vs 26 months) and increased the risk of treatment-refractory disease. In this interview with i3 Heal...