
Early phase cancer research – ready for a change?
New recommendations of the MDICT Taskforce highlight the need to rethink how research studies are conducted and of multi-stakeholder collaboration

Is ATR inhibition a potential new treatment for rare gynaecological cancers?
Ceralasertib, alone or in combination with PARP inhibition, showed signs of clinical efficacy in patients with relapsed ovarian and endometrial clear cell carcinomas (CCC), for whom effective treatment options are currently lacking

Ovarian cancer: updated phase III data provide reassurance for the use of PARPi as maintenance therapy
Sustained benefit of PARPi treatment may help to put the recent concerns on how and when to use these agents in women into context

Is overall survival the right endpoint for PARPi trials in ovarian cancer?
Unfavourable overall survival data for PARP inhibitors in certain ovarian cancers prompts calls for caution in interpretation of the analyses and stimulates the search for surrogate measures of clinical benefit

HPV vaccination uptake reflects our efforts as one oncology community
Cervical cancer is a preventable disease so, although research advances are increasing treatment opportunities for all women diagnosed at any stage, we must stop it before it hits.

Preliminary activity is reported with an anti-IL-8 monoclonal antibody plus nivolumab in melanoma
Combination therapy with BMS-986253 shows promise in patients progressing on checkpoint inhibitors

Combined biomarker analysis shows promise as a tissue agnostic response predictor for immunotherapy-based treatment
Pre-treatment expression of Ki-67 plus FOXC1 plus PD-L1 predicted response to neoadjuvant treatment in breast and head and neck tumours, although more work is required to determine its use in the context of immunotherapy alone

Do immune checkpoint inhibitors affect COVID-19 severity?
A joint analysis of the OnCovid and ESMO-CoCARE registries confirms the protective role of anti-SARS-CoV-2 vaccination in cancer patients treated with immunotherapy

Two studies explore new predictive biomarkers for immunotherapy in NSCLC
Different methods – multiparametric biomarker assessment and FDG-PET – show mixed accuracy and their applicability in clinical practice needs to be assessed

Neoadjuvant camrelizumab plus chemotherapy improves pathologic complete response in stage IIIA and B NSCLC
Positive results from a phase II trial adds weight to the value of immunotherapy as neoadjuvant treatment for resectable NSCLC