SEATTLE — May 26, 2023 — At the 2023 American Society for Clinical Oncology Annual Meeting — to be held June 2-6 in Chicago, Illinois — Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center experts will present research spanning survivorship, advances in treatments and clinical trials, how access to cancer care affects outcomes, integrative medicine and more.
Featured Fred Hutch presentations and poster sessions are listed below; for a full list of Fred Hutch research at ASCO and the dates and times of presentations, please visit our website. For media inquiries at ASCO, please contact Claire Hudson at crhudson@fredhutch.org. You can follow our researchers on Twitter #ASCO23 and visit us at booth #4023.
Equitable access to cancer care
Dr. Hiba Khan will present an oral abstract assessing the impact of financial distress on cancer survival as evidenced in credit records. Researchers in Fred Hutch’s Hutchinson Institute for Cancer Outcomes Research, or HICOR, found that patients with cancer who experienced severe adverse financial events, such as third-party collections, delinquent mortgage payments, tax liens, foreclosures or repossessions within two years of diagnosis were at higher risk for mortality after adjusting for sociodemographic and clinical factors.
Additional research on health equity and access includes:
Clinical trials and treatment advances
Dr. Noam Kopmar and colleagues sought to understand the potential benefit of adding an antibody drug conjugate to frontline therapy to treat patients with relapsed or refractory B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia or lymphoma. In an oral presentation, Dr. Kopmar will explain findings that adding the antibody drug was not only safe, but response rates in patients were among the highest reported to date and many patients were able to proceed to bone marrow transplant.
In a SWOG Cancer Research Network analysis, presented in an oral abstract by Dr. Megan Othus, a research team found that a common system for measuring tumor progression in clinical trials didn’t adequately correspond to outcomes in patients with rare cancers treated with checkpoint inhibitors in the S1609 DART trial. These findings are consistent with similar studies of the use of this measuring system in patients treated with chemotherapy.
In an oral presentation, Dr. Shailender Bhatia will present findings from a Phase 2 clinical trial in metastatic Merkel cell carcinoma patients that assessed nivolumab monotherapy and nivolumab plus ipilimumab combination in two non-randomized cohorts respectively. The results do not suggest additional benefit from nivolumab plus ipilimumab in this patient population, contrary to a recent publication that had reported 100% response rate with combination therapy.
Experts will share more from the following treatment studies:
Survivorship
Pediatric cancer patients who receive certain therapies are at an increased risk of heart disease later in life. Dr. Eric Chow will present an oral abstract of a Children’s Oncology Group study that found a better method to predict which pediatric cancer patients will develop heart disease years after treatment. Prediction models that incorporate conventional heart measurements may be able to accurately identify childhood cancer patients at high risk of developing heart disease within 2-5 years, giving care teams a potential window of opportunity to provide treatments that can slow or stop heart disease progression.
Precision oncology
Dr. Manoj Menon will share insights in a poster session from a study that conducted molecular testing on breast cancer tumors from patients at the Uganda Cancer Institute. The research team found a diverse range of mutations and prevalence of BRCA1, BRCA2 and PIK3CA mutations that were considerably higher than in other documented populations. This data could inform wider use of targeted therapies in sub-Saharan Africa, where breast cancer is the most common cancer, and make the case for including targeted cancer therapies in the World Health Organization’s Model List of Essential Medicines.
Dr. Ruben Raychaudhuri and collaborators investigated targeted therapies for people with metastatic castration resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) with DNA damage repair alterations in two studies. One poster session will explore how mutations in DNA damage repair genes may affect PSMA expression and response to PSMA targeted radioligand therapy. A second poster session will detail two-year follow up results from a single arm pilot study also focused on patients with DNA damage repair alterations. In this study, researchers found that the addition of the DNA damaging agent carboplatin to standard of care docetaxel significantly improved response rates.
Integrative medicine
In patients with non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer, researchers tested the feasibility and efficacy of in-office acupuncture to reduce pain and urinary symptoms during induction intravesical Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG). In a poster session, led by Dr. Sarah Psutka, researchers observed improvements in urinary symptoms and a suggestion of a reduction in pain scores over successive treatments in the patients who received acupuncture.
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Media Contact:
Claire Hudson
206-919-8300
crhudson@fredhutch.org
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center unites individualized care and advanced research to provide the latest cancer treatment options while accelerating discoveries that prevent, treat and cure cancer and infectious diseases worldwide.
Based in Seattle, Fred Hutch is an independent, nonprofit organization and the only National Cancer Institute-designated cancer center in Washington. We have earned a global reputation for our track record of discoveries in cancer, infectious disease and basic research, including important advances in bone marrow transplantation, immunotherapy, HIV/AIDS prevention and COVID-19 vaccines. Fred Hutch operates eight clinical care sites that provide medical oncology, infusion, radiation, proton therapy and related services and has network affiliations with hospitals in four states. Fred Hutch also serves as UW Medicine’s cancer program.
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