Specialty Pharmacy

Specialty pharmacists have the expertise and respect necessary to change the health care system while listening to patients’ needs and guiding them through difficult experiences.

The approval is based on results from the phase 2 KEYNOTE-629 trial, which found an objective response rate of 50% in adults with recurrent, metastatic, or locally advanced cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma.

Researchers found an overall response rate of 29.8% in patients treated with 177Lu-PSMA-617, compared to a 1.7% partial response in the standard of care only arm.

Umbralisib was granted accelerated approval by the FDA for the treatment of select patients with relapsed/refractory marginal zone lymphoma and relapsed/refractory follicular lymphoma.

In the ZUMA-5 cohort, 94% of patients achieved a response compared to 50% of patients in the control cohort with an odds ratio of 16.2.

Earlier this year, the FDA granted accelerated approval to tepotinib (Tepmetko, EMD Serono Inc) for the treatment of adults with metastatic non-small cell lung cancer who are harboring MET exon 14 skipping alterations.

Positive topline results have been published from a phase 3 trial assessing the CD-19 directed CAR T cell therapy lisocabtagene maraleucel as a second-line treatment in adults with relapsed or refractory LBCL.

Specialty medications should not be defined by their cost and should instead be defined by their efficacy.

A lower antibody response found in one-fourth of patients taking methotrexate does not necessarily mean that these patients are not protected against COVID-19.

In the United States, endometrial cancer is the most common cancer of female reproductive organs.

The study examining venetoclax and obinutuzumab is in progress and currently recruiting patients who are newly diagnosed with asymptomatic, high-risk CLL.

Dealing with a cancer diagnosis is difficult, but patients with MM have reason to be hopeful. Survival rates are on the rise, and a robust pipeline of promising immunotherapies and novel treatment options are in development.

Pharmacists have always been a vital member of the cancer care team, but the emergence of many new oral therapies is making their role in patient care a more prominent one.

Study results demonstrated consistent benefit across higher and lower-risk patients.

Vast opportunities are opening every day for pharmacists, especially with the upcoming complex biological products that need a lot of therapeutic drug monitoring and fine adjustment of doses.

In PD-L1-positive patients, tislelizumab improved median overall survival by 3.5 months with a 46% decrease in the risk of death compared with chemotherapy.

This is the first approval for secukinumab in a pediatric population in the United States for severe plaque psoriasis.

Understanding how formularies work is essential in the world of pharmacy and knowledge on this topic can help pharmacists to better serve patients.

Lung cancer, the most common cancer type with the highest mortality, can largely be categorized by the genetic mutations that cause it.

Adverse effects from intravenous immunoglobulin tend to be mild, but moderate and severe adverse effects have been observed.

The legislation would require that patients with cancer have access to oral oncology drugs within 72 hours of having the prescription submitted to the patient’s pharmacy benefits manager.

Physical changes to DNA may contribute to greater inflammation and fatigue for these individuals.

In a trial of amivantamab-vmjw, investigators found an overall response rate of 40% among patients with non-small cell lung cancer whose tumors have epidermal growth factor receptor exon 20 insertion mutations.

The investigators found that using the vaccine in combination with an immune checkpoint inhibitor—an established immunotherapy drug with a 20% success rate overall for patients—can vastly improve the proportion of individuals who respond to treatments, eliminating tumors in 75% of cases in mice.

Topline results from the phase 2/3 XIRIUS study of cotoretigene toliparvovec (BIIB112), a gene therapy being investigated as a one-time therapy for patients with X-linked retinitis pigmentosa (XLRP), found that the study did not meet its primary endpoint of demonstrating a statistically significant improvement in the proportion of treated study eyes.

The trial found positive results in both the overall study population of patients with advanced cervical cancer as well as subgroups with squamous cell carcinoma and adenocarcinoma.

The durvalumab plus chemotherapy arm demonstrated a statistically significant improvement in PFS versus chemotherapy in the previous analysis, but the OS trend observed in this analysis did not achieve statistical significance.

As breast cancer becomes an increasingly treatable disease, clinicians should provide personalized follow-up care to address varying burdens of symptoms up to 5 years after diagnosis.