Medical Oncology
Physician insights on cancer treatment protocols, immunotherapy, targeted therapies, and clinical trial updates.
Recent Discussions
In what scenarios do you use a chromogenic factor X assay in adjusting INR goals for patients on warfarin?
I do not use this method. It has been suggested that such assays be used in patients with lupus-type inhibitors who have significantly prolonged prothrombin times at baseline. In this setting, if the INR is "therapeutic," one would confirm an adequate warfarin effect if the factor X activity was in ...
What are the treatment options for a patient with unfavorable intermediate risk PCa who desires future child bearing?
The best option for such patients would be sperm banking prior to treatment, whether they undergo RT+ADT or surgery. See this prior post on this forum regarding the impact of RT on fertility. Given the expected internal scatter dose to the testes during a course of fractionated RT, it would not be s...
How would you manage locally advanced, resectable gastric cancer that is MSI-H?
I would not recommend FLOT + durvalumab for MSI-H gastric/GEJ patients. I say this because there is mounting evidence that chemotherapy may not provide a significant benefit for these MSI-H patients at all (1). All efforts should be made to spare this patient population from getting cytotoxic chemot...
In a patient with borderline resectable pancreatic adenocarcinoma s/p 10 cycles FOLFOX and aborted Whipple due to locally advanced disease, do you recommend dose escalation beyond 54 Gy?
Yes, there is no contraindication to giving an ablative dose after exploration. 54 Gray is a palliative dose, which has not improved overall survival based on the LAP07 trial. While it's fair to say that we do not know the definition of definitive or ablative in LAPC, we have published OS results ve...
What is the maximum dose that you would give to residual unresectable gross disease in the axilla in the setting of recurrent breast cancer s/p ALND?
The FAST-Forward boost trial will be informative here, and I would recommend reading the protocol, because one can consider using the standard arm now, which is 40 Gy to the breast (and nodes, when RNI is indicated), and a 48 Gy boost, all in 15 fractions. This dose is recognizable as the breast boo...
Would you use perioperative durvalumab in patients with diffuse-type gastric adenocarcinoma given no event-free survival benefit was seen for these patients in MATTERHORN?
Although MATTERHORN demonstrated a significant event-free survival benefit for perioperative durvalumab plus FLOT in the overall population, the forest plot does not show a clearly favorable signal in the diffuse-type subgroup. Because subgroup analyses are underpowered and not intended to confirm l...
In light of recent updates on neoadjuvant enfortumab vedotin plus pembrolizumab for muscle-invasive bladder cancer showing benefit, how should a trimodality bladder-preservation strategy be contextualized?
The treatment of muscle-invasive bladder cancer. has evolved quickly. Neoadjuvant EVP is absolutely the standard of care in all patients who can receive it. The clinical trials (EV-303/304) used cystectomy as the bladder-directed therapy, and this is the standard of care. Having said that, many pati...
Would you add immunotherapy to FOLFOX if the patient is not a FLOT candidate for neoadjuvant gastric cancer, extrapolating data from the MATTERHORN study?
While it is always somewhat perilous to extrapolate from a proper study to lesser situations, this seems quite reasonable. It seems highly unlikely that the removal of Taxotere from a fluoropyrimidine-oxaliplatin-based regimen would render immunotherapy less effective in gastric cancer. In the MATTE...
How do you reconcile the differing outcomes of the MATTERHORN and KEYNOTE-585 trials when determining systemic treatment approach for gastric/GEJ adenocarcinoma?
As it turns out, the outcomes are much more similar than dissimilar. While we all know MATTERHORN was a clearly positive study, KEYNOTE-585 was essentially also a positive study, obscured by a negative overall interpretation and undermined by its complicated statistical design.Specifically, 804 pati...
For patients with locally advanced GEJ adenocarcinoma with low PDL-1 score, will you still incorporate durvalumab with FLOT therapy?
Yes. I would still incorporate durvalumab with FLOT in patients with locally advanced GEJ adenocarcinoma even when PD-L1 expression is low. MATTERHORN was intentionally designed as an all-comers study without PD-L1 selection, and the event-free survival benefit was observed in the overall population...