“This trial highlights how effective our pediatric and young adult oncologists are at accruing: This is a rare disease, and they were able to put more than 1,500 patients on trial with this rare disease over the course of time,” commented ASCO President Bruce E. Johnson, MD, FASCO.
The new combination regimens are noteworthy in that they improved survival by an absolute 10% without minimal increase in toxicity, he maintained.
“This is part of the paradigm where nelarabine had been approved [by the FDA] for relapsed or recurrent disease, and in this particular setting, it has been moved upfront, closer to the initial treatment, improving the outcomes for those patients,” elaborated Dr. Johnson, who is also a professor of medicine at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and a leader of the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center Lung Cancer Program, both in Boston.