The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has launched an initiative called Project Patient Voice to create a publicly available information bank describing patient-reported symptoms from cancer trials for marketed treatments. The initiative is a part of the FDA’s Oncology Center of Excellence (OCE), which is designed to advance the development and regulation of oncology…

First-line maintenance therapy with Ninlaro (ixazomib) significantly delays disease progression or death in adults with multiple myeloma who had not been initially treated with an autologous stem cell transplant (ASCT), according to data from a Phase 3 trial. “There is a strong need for additional maintenance treatments for multiple myeloma, where currently approved options are limited,” Meletios…

ERC Belgium has asked the European Medicines Agency (EMA) to give conditional approval to its investigational anti-cancer vaccine Gliovac (ERC1671) for the treatment of recurrent glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer. Gliovac, which the company also refers to as Sitoiganap, is an advanced form of immunotherapy made up of cancer cells and other tumoral components freshly…

UbiVac and Bristol Myers Squibb have announced plans to collaborate on a clinical trial to test whether a combination therapy approach can boost cancer immunity in patients with advanced triple negative breast cancer. The Phase 1b trial will evaluate the safety, tolerability, and preliminary efficacy of UbiVac’s investigational product, DPV-001, in combination with Bristol Myers Squibb’s…

The combination therapy of melflufen (melphalan flufenamide) and dexamethasone continues to be safe and to elicit deep and durable responses in hard-to-treat patients with relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma, top-line data from a Phase 2 clinical trial shows. The findings will support Oncopeptides‘ submission of a new drug application  requesting accelerated approval of melflufen for treating relapsed…

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved Keytruda (pembrolizumab) as a treatment for people with recurrent or metastatic cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma (cSCC) — the second most common form of skin cancer — that is not curable by surgery or radiation therapy. The decision was based on data from a Phase 2 trial called…

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted priority review to the new drug application (NDA) Myovant Sciences submitted earlier this year requesting the approval of relugolix for the treatment of men with advanced prostate cancer. The priority review status will shorten relugolix’s regulatory review for this indication from the standard 10 months to…

A team at Griffith University’s Institute for Glycomics in Australia has received $300,000 in funding from The Bourne Foundation, as well as a further funding pledge from Tour de Cure, to advance research into the development of blood tests for the early diagnosis of ovarian cancer. “Despite decades of research, there is currently no easily accessible, non-invasive and…

Belantamab mafodotin, GlaxoSmithKline’s investigational antibody-drug conjugate, continues to show promise when used alone or in combination with other approved therapies to treat people with relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma, according to data from two clinical trials. Findings from both trials — DREAMM-2 (NCT03525678) and DREAMM-6 (NCT03544281) — were presented in two posters at the recent…

The Chinese National Medical Products Administration (NMPA) has approved Keytruda (pembrolizumab) as a second-line therapy for patients with locally advanced or metastatic esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) whose tumors have at least 10% of cells producing the PD-L1 protein. With the new approval, Keytruda is now available in China for five indications across three different…

The U.S. rates of advanced prostate cancer continued to rise in men 50 and older after the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) recommended in 2012 against prostate-specific antigen (PSA)-based screening for all men, an American Cancer Society study shows. Notably, the annual increase in men ages 50–74 with the most advanced stage disease after…

Investigators using targeted proteomics — a technique to detect proteins of interest — on samples of ovarian cancer found a wide variety of biomarkers that might help predict which chemotherapies patients are more likely to respond to, the precision medicines company mProbe reported. Identifying these tumor biomarkers is crucial not only to spotting potential targets for future therapies, but also…