The U. S. Food and Drug Administration approved denosumab for the treatment of adults and skeletally mature adolescents with giant cell tumour of bone that is unresectable or where surgical resection is likely to result in severe morbidity.

Denosumab’s approval was based on demonstration of durable objective responses observed in two multicenter open label trials enrolling adult and skeletally mature adolescents with histologically confirmed, measurable giant cell tumour of bone.

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Dr Valentin Goede presented promising outcomes for elderly CLL patients at the 18th Congress of the European Hematology Association in Stockholm.

CLL is the most common leukaemia in the western world.

Many CLL patients are elderly and have comorbidities rendering them ineligible for aggressive standard treatments.

It has been an unresolved question whether (i) combination treatment with the chemotherapeutic drug chlorambucil plus a monoclonal CD20 antibody improves outcomes for such patients compared to treatment with chlorambucil alone and (ii) these patients benefit from the use of the novel CD20 antibody obinutuzumab (GA101) relative to the approved CD20 antibody rituximab.

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Dr Ross Levine presented results from a study on targeting the JAK-STAT pathway in myeloproliferative neoplasms at the EHA 2013.

Myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPN) are clonal blood disorders characterised by excessive production of mature blood cells.

Patients present with large spleens, systemic symptoms, and high levels of circulating inflammatory cytokines.

The identification of somatic mutations in JAK2, MPL and LNK in the majority of MPN patients led to the development of JAK kinase inhibitors.

JAK1/2 inhibitors improve splenomegaly and systemic symptoms, however the mechanism by which this occurs in patients has not been elucidated.

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Multiple myeloma is the second most common haematological cancer.

It is a cancer of the plasma cells and it accounts for approx. 1% of all cancers.

At present, no cure is available.

The 5-year relative survival rate for multiple myeloma is around 40% so there is a strong need for new treatment modalities to improve the survival.

Daratumumab is a human CD38 monoclonal antibody being tested against multiple myeloma, but it could also have potential in a broad range of other hematological diseases.

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Treatment for patients with multiple myeloma (MM) has improved over the last decade due to the introduction of new drugs such as lenalidomide and bortezomib.

However, after receiving multiple treatments, MM patients often become resistant (refractory) to these drugs and have an average survival of only 9 months.

MM-003 is a large, multi-centre phase 3 study that assessed the efficacy and safety of a new drug, pomalidomide (POM) in combination with low-dose dexamethasone (POM LoDex) and compared this combination with high dose dexamethasone in MM patients with late stage disease which have previously failed lenalidomide and bortezomib.

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The last 30 years have seen a plethora of treatments for diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) but few advances have been made.

Recent studies identified B-cell receptor signaling as critical for many B-cell lymphomas including the most common type, called diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL).

Recent studies have shown that DLBCL is actually not a single disease but at least 3 different diseases, each with its own critical abnormalities that allow it to survive as a malignancy.

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A large, randomised study conducted among 150,000 women in India over a period of 15 years reports that biennial visual inspection with acetic acid (VIA), or vinegar, delivered by primary health workers, reduced cervical cancer mortality by nearly one-third (31 percent).

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Ten years of adjuvant treatment with tamoxifen provides women with oestrogen-receptor-positive (ER ) breast cancer greater protection against late recurrence and death from breast cancer than does the current standard of only five years of tamoxifen, according to the British aTTom study.

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A randomised phase III study, DECISION, finds that the targeted drug sorafenib stalls disease progression by five months in patients with metastatic differentiated thyroid cancer that has progressed despite standard radioactive iodine (RAI) therapy.

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A subset of colorectal cancers responds to anti-epidermal growth factor receptor (anti-EGFR) therapies, but develops resistance within months.

Among cancers that develop resistance to anti-EGFR therapy, some showed overexpression of a gene called MET, according to a study published in Cancer Discovery, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.

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