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Regeneron Pharmaceuticals and Avalanche Biotechnologies announced a collaboration to discover, develop, and commercialize novel gene therapy products for the treatment of ophthalmologic diseases.

Technical advances in radiotherapy (RT), especially stereotactic ablative body radiotherapy (SABR), have allowed many non–small-cell lung cancer patients once considered untreatable to be eligible for locally effective therapies. Some patients will experience recurrence or will present with multiple lung primaries. We review the success and impact of SABR in patients who have undergone multiple course therapy.

Previous data from our institution suggest that imaging evidence of extracapsular extension, identified on pretreatment CT scans, independently predicts for worse distant control and survival for oropharyngeal squamous cell cancer (OPC) patients undergoing radiation therapy. In this present study, we sought to validate these findings in non-OPC head and neck squamous cell cancers.

An unmet clinical need in breast cancer (BC) management is the identification of which patients will respond to radiation therapy (RT). We hypothesized that the integration of post-RT clonogenic survival data with gene expression data across a large spectrum of BC cell lines would generate a BC-specific RT sensitivity signature predictive for RT response in BC patients and allow identification of patients with tumors refractive to conventional therapy.

Despite the success of stereotactic body radiotherapy (SBRT) as a treatment modality for early-stage non–small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC), some patients develop localized intrathoracic recurrences after treatment. Effective salvage therapy for these patients has typically been limited. We examine our institutional experience using SBRT for salvage of intrathoracic recurrence after definitive SBRT for early-stage NSCLC.

In patients with non–small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) treated with stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT), there are few established predictors of outcomes. Pretreatment maximum standardized uptake value (SUVmax) has recently been debated as a prognosticator of progression-free survival (PFS). Here, we present a retrospective series with up to 86 months follow-up evaluating potential prognosticators of outcomes.

The effectiveness of radiation treatments for patients with squamous cell cancer of the head and neck has been reviewed by an international team of researchers. They identified two biomarkers that were good at predicting a patient's resistance to radiation therapy. "While our findings are encouraging, and a step toward personalized medicine, we hope to do more of this research with a larger, randomized trial," the authors conclude.

Advances in treating multiple myeloma have transformed the field over the past decade, giving clinicians more effective therapy options for newly diagnosed patients who are candidates for stem cell transplant and those who are not.

In the future, we also need to improve our ability to personalize the duration of endocrine therapy, with a goal of optimizing patient selection for extended therapy. Hopefully, clinical-pathologic indices and predictive biomarkers similar to the Oncotype DX 12-gene recurrence score or the PAM50 risk of recurrence score for adjuvant chemotherapy will soon emerge to guide adjuvant endocrine therapy.

The standard of care for metastatic renal cell carcinoma (RCC) prevailed in a randomized comparison of everolimus (Afinitor) and sunitinib (Sutent) as first-line therapy

Researchers have had little success in developing an HIV cure, but recent studies involving gene therapy, immune-based therapy, reactivation of the immune system, and "very early" treatment have produced promising results.

The ratio of two protein levels may predict clinical benefit of EGFR inhibitors. Low levels of a protein called Mig6 (mitogen-inducible gene 6) and high levels of EGFR corresponded to a higher clinical response rate and progression-free survival in a small prospective cohort of lung cancer patients treated with the anti-EGFR therapy gefitinib.