OncTimes Talk

Although co-medication with proton pump inhibitors (PPI) is not advised for patients being treated with dasatanib for their chronic myeloid leukemia (CML), confirmation that this recommendation is often overlooked has been reported in a study led by Torsten Dahlén, a PhD student at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden.

Furthermore, the study found a higher than previously reported negative interaction of PPI comedication on crystalline dasatinib bioavailability that may compromise clinical efficacy and risk CML disease progression.

The latest findings from the study were reported in a poster session at the 2024 ASCO Annual Meeting where Oncology Times reporter Peter Goodwin met up with Olof Harlin, PhD, of Xspray Pharma, based in Solna, near Stockholm, Sweden.

Patients who had immune-related adverse events had better responses and lived longer than those who didn’t. This was a real-world observational study of patients with recurrent or metastatic head and neck squamous cell carcinoma treated with immune checkpoint inhibitor monotherapy, reported at the 2024 ASCO Annual Meeting.

OncTimesTalk reporter Peter Goodwin caught up with the lead study author Chiara Gottardi, MD, who specializes in head and neck cancer in the Department of Surgery, Oncology, and Gastroenterology in the Istituto Oncologico Veneto at the University of Padova in Italy.

In this episode of OncTimes Talk, we chat with Katie Coleman. Diagnosed with an ultra-rare stage IV kidney cancer in 2020, her prognosis had a chance to significantly change after six months. Since then, Katie has since become an Author, founded a non-profit organization, and has become a podcast host—all with the goal of giving back to cancer research.



Katiekickscancer.com

Double checkpoint blockade using a single bispecific agent could become the new standard for treating advanced gastric cancer regardless of PD-L1 status, according to research reported at the AACR Annual Meeting 2024.

The investigational bispecific antibody drug cadonilimab (used with chemotherapy) significantly extended life and delayed disease progression among patients with HER2-negative advanced or metastatic gastric or gastroesophageal junction cancers reported from Chinese investigators.

The first author of the report, Jiafu Ji, MD, PhD, DrPH, FACS, FRCS, Fellow of the Chinese Academy of Medical Science, as well as Professor and Chief of the Gastrointestinal Cancer Center at Peking University Cancer Hospital and the Beijing Institute for Cancer Research in China, called into the Oncology Times office at AACR after his talk to discuss his team’s findings with Peter Goodwin, an OncTimesTalk correspondent.

About a quarter of all patients with newly diagnosed triple-negative breast cancer will not benefit from neoadjuvant checkpoint inhibitor immunotherapy with an agent such as pembrolizumab—even though it improves outcomes among the remaining majority.



At the 14th European Breast Cancer Conference, held in Milan, Italy, Laura van ’t Veer, PhD, Program Leader of the Breast Oncology Program at the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, reported findings from the I-SPY2 TRIAL showing that analysis of “response predictive subtypes” identified a subset of patients with triple-negative early-stage breast cancers with a very low likelihood of response to neoadjuvant immunotherapy and can be spared potential toxicities.



After her talk in Milan, van ’t Veer called in to the OncTimesTalk studio to talk about the I-SPY findings with Peter Goodwin.