News & Updates

Oral arsenic trioxide (ATO) for the treatment of acute promyelocytic leukaemia (APL), developed at the Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), is the first-ever prescription medication wholly invented and manufactured in Hong Kong to obtain US, European and Japanese patents, and the first to receive orphan drug designation (ODD) from US FDA and the European Medicines Agency (EMA) as well as an investigational new drug designation (IND) from the US FDA. According to APL Asian Consortium’s (APLAC) data collected over a 21.5-year period, frontline oral or intravenous (IV) ATO significantly decreases early deaths and improves relapse-free survival (RFS) and overall survival (OS) vs ATO-free regimens.

Some cancer patients with acute oncology-related presentations at the emergency department (ED) can be managed at ambulatory clinics, suggests a Singapore study.

A contact X-ray brachytherapy (CXB) dose escalation enhances the organ preservation (OP) rate of patients with early rectal adenocarcinoma, with good bowel function at 3 years, results of the OPERA trial have shown. This benefit persists at year 5, particularly in those with small early-stage tumours.

Neoadjuvant radiation therapy and docetaxel prior to prostatectomy in men with localized high-risk prostate cancer has a modest toxicity profile and results in reasonable long-term outcomes, but pathologic complete response (pCR) is not achieved, results of a phase I/II trial have shown.

Patients with metastatic renal cell carcinoma (RCC) may gain significantly better survival outcomes with lenvatinib therapy than with other tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs), suggests a study.

In the first-line treatment of patients with EGFR-mutated locally advanced or metastatic non–small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC), the novel third-generation EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitor rezivertinib yields superior overall efficacy and progression-free survival (PFS) when compared with gefitinib, with no new safety signals, according to the phase III REZOR trial.

For patients with resectable esophageal adenocarcinoma, survival outcomes appear to be better with perioperative chemotherapy with FLOT vs preoperative chemoradiotherapy, according to a phase III study.

When treating patients with locally advanced esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) in the neoadjuvant setting, chemoradiotherapy with or without sintilimab results in significantly higher pathological complete response (pCR) rates compared with chemotherapy plus sintilimab, according to preliminary data from the phase III SCIENCE trial from China.