The ‘Four Buckets’ of Breakthroughs in Endometrial Cancer

At the American Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting, several important abstracts on endometrial cancer were presented, introducing some novel therapies that physicians are hoping will eventually enter the treatment landscape for these patients.

In this exclusive MedPage Today video, Richard Penson, MBBS, of Mass General Cancer Center at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, breaks down the four areas he believes will change the treatment landscape.

Following is a transcript of his remarks:

Commonly. I will hold up my fingers to patients and say, there are four things that we’re trying to get to work, PARP inhibitors, anti-angiogenics, immunotherapy, and targeted therapy. And I sort of bucket them like that. And so I think the anti-angiogenics like with Brad [Monk]’s presentation at ASCO, it’s still an important part of our treatment.

Immunotherapies — lots of new things — the Regeneron trial update was exciting. The cocktail of things, the use of CTLA-4, some of the new things targeted at ARID1A, not just EZH [enhancer of zeste homolog] inhibitors, but immunotherapy. That sort of whole thing is really exciting.

PARP inhibitors, that we’re now moved into the era of DNA damage response pathways — ATR, ATM, CHK, WEE — that we are in the next generation, the next iteration of those drugs.

And the targets, the 20,000 genes that we have and the large number of sort of composite problems with how cancers develop. We really are starting to dissect that. And I think it feels like combinations of therapies have arrived.

They’re sort of like combination chemo has a ceiling, doesn’t feel like that is a mirage for the new biologic agents. When you put these things together, you really get additive and better benefit.