Current Quality of Life (QoL) assessments in cancer trials fail to capture severe, long-term toxicities. They are designed for short-term effects and data collection often ceases after a patient experiences a life-changing adverse event, thus painting an inaccurately rosy picture of a drug's tolerability.
For aggressive diseases like muscle-invasive bladder cancer, where half of patients historically relapsed and died quickly, using transformative perioperative regimens that overtreat some patients is a reasonable strategy to achieve high cure rates (e.g., 60% pathologic complete response) for the overall group.
Some oncologists are stopping guideline-supported perioperative treatment regimens early if a patient achieves a pathologic complete response (pCR) from neoadjuvant therapy alone. This practice is considered premature and risky, as data from dedicated de-escalation trials like VOLGA is not yet available to support it.
The current pipeline for antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) in bladder cancer focuses on incremental changes. These include creating "me-too" drugs similar to Enfortumab Vedotin, or swapping its toxic payload for a different one while keeping the same Nectin-4 target. No immediate practice-changing breakthroughs are expected.
Kidney cancer has lagged other tumor types in adopting circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) analysis because it sheds very little DNA into the blood. Only recently have diagnostic assays become sensitive enough to reliably detect it, finally unlocking its potential as a clinical biomarker for guiding adjuvant therapy.
Oncology research is moving beyond standard quality-of-life metrics to study 'decision regret' and toxicity perception after adjuvant therapy is completed. This novel approach better captures the long-term psychological impact on patients, whose perspectives often change dramatically months or years after their initial treatment decision.
The highly anticipated PROTEUS trial is testing a new drug combination against a control arm of ADT plus placebo for prostatectomy patients. This design is controversial because ADT is not standard care in this setting, raising concerns that a positive result could be driven by a suboptimal control arm.
After years of treatment intensification, a new focus in metastatic hormone-sensitive prostate cancer is de-escalation. Trials like ADREAM are evaluating planned treatment interruptions for patients with excellent responses, aiming to provide 'treatment-free intervals' that improve quality of life without sacrificing efficacy.
Research is validating whether the Decipher genomic classifier can predict which patients with metastatic hormone-sensitive prostate cancer benefit from adding docetaxel chemotherapy. This would provide high-level evidence for a personalized approach, sparing patients with low-risk genomics from unnecessary chemotherapy and its associated toxicities.
A major trial on a less-frequent dosing schedule for denosumab in patients with bone metastases is being presented in a breast cancer session because it included both patient populations. This highlights the need for oncologists to monitor key research outside their specialty, as practice-changing data can emerge from unexpected places.