Onco Actu du 20 novembre 2018

	3.2 Prévention - Obésité
Linda Bauld: Why we need to keep talking about obesity and cancer [BMJ Blogs] Smoking rates didn’t come down on their own. The decline followed decades of effort to raise awareness about the health risks, coupled with strong policy action such as tobacco taxation, a ban on smoking in indoor public places, removing tobacco marketing and more recently introducing standardised packaging. Cancer Research UK aims to help tackle obesity in a similar way, by pushing the government and food and drink industry to act in the interests of public health.
	4. Dépistage, diagnostic et pronostic
New Report Outlines Cancer Screening’s Future Potential [ACS] The report outlines five key focus areas to help cancer screening realize its full potential.
	4.2 Dép., diag. & prono. - Génome
Now You Can Sequence Your Whole Genome for Just $200 [Wired] Veritas is offering DNA reading, cheap, for two days. But most consumers don’t understand the difference between that and a 23andMe test.
	5. Traitements
Low-Fat Abiraterone Food Effect Is of Great Consequence [Journal of Clinical Oncology] For the authors of the editorial to call these results of small consequence when huge numbers of men could receive this important drug at a quarter of its current price is absolutely wrong; they are emphasizing small residual uncertainties and ignoring the global value of the reduced-dose treatment.
	5.12 Immunothérapies
Cancer drug's stumbles prompt calls to rethink how immune therapies are tested [Nature] Some researchers say that clinical trials of drugs to bolster the body's immune system are moving too fast.
11 Things We'd Really Like to Know - How Can We Unleash the Immune System? [NY Times] Although immunotherapy can work wonders for cancer, it does not help everyone, side effects can be fierce, and costs are high. But the field is young.
	5.12.1 Immunothérapies - partenariats
Undeterred by exec exodus, Immunocore nabs $100M cash to co-develop preclinical asset with Roche [EndPoints] Under the new Roche deal, Immunocore is tasked with conducting the first human trials testing the safety and efficacy of IMC-C103C as both monotherapy and in combination with Tecentriq in studies that are set to begin early next year in patients with different types of solid tumors.
	5.12.2 Immunothérapies - CAR-T, thérapies cellulaires
TIL Therapy Explained by Steven Rosenberg, MD, PhD [AACR] “The methods utilized in this study represent a blueprint for the isolation of T cells that can react against any type of cancer,” said Rosenberg. “Because all cancers have mutations, the techniques that we’ve described can potentially be used to identify T cells that react to mutations that occur in any tumor.”
	5.12.5 Immunothérapies - Pharma
Pfizer, Merck KGaA report their latest setback with checkpoint contender Bavencio [EndPoints] The checkpoint either alone or in combination with chemotherapy failed to hit either the overall survival or progression-free survival endpoints in their Phase III JAVELIN Ovarian 200 study for drug-resistant ovarian cancer.
	5.12.6 Immunothérapies - AMM
Roche pulls EU application for Tecentriq in kidney cancer [BiopharmaDive] That Roche pulled its application suggests the company doesn't believe its current case, with results only on progression-free survival, will be enough for an approval. Perhaps affecting its decision-making are emerging datasets from competitors with supportive OS data.
Roche withdraws Tecentriq combo application in first-line renal cell carcinoma [Pharmafile] Specifically, Roche pulled the application because study findings on the drug combo’s efficacy “are not sufficient to support an extension of indication at this time.”
	5.12.8 Immunothérapies - Economie
China’s Alphamab Oncology pulls off $100M series A [FierceBiotech] It has four programs in the clinic, including two bispecific antibodies, according to the statement: KN046, an antibody that targets PD-L1 and CTLA-4, and KN026, which targets HER2. Both are currently in phase 1—KN046 in Australia with multiple phase 1/2 trials to follow in China and KN026 in China, with a second phase 1 study coming up in the U.S.
	5.2.1 Pharma - Partenariats
Palantir to offer cancer analytics under JV deal with Germany's Merck [Reuters] “Our customers will pay a license fee for a software, enabling them to aggregate and analyze data from highly disparate sources,” Merck Chief Executive Stefan Oschmann told Reuters, adding the joint venture would not buy or sell any data.
	5.3.4 Traitements - AMM (FDA, EMA,...)
Seattle Genetics' Adcetris scores quick lymphoma OK under FDA's new review program [FiercePharma] The Adcetris approval came only 2 weeks after Seattle Genetics completed its FDA application and 6 months earlier than expected, Leerink Research analyst Andrew Berens, M.D., wrote in a note. His team believes “uptake will be rapid given that only chemotherapy is available to treat this disease, unlike Hodgkin's lymphoma."
CHMP Issues Positive Opinion on Split Dosing Regimen for DARZALEX® (daratumumab) [Genmab] The positive opinion of the CHMP was based on data from the Phase Ib EQUULEUS (MMY1001) clinical trial, which demonstrated daratumumab pharmacokinetics (PK) concentrations were comparable regardless of whether the first dose was administered as a split infusion or as a single first infusion in patients with multiple myeloma.
	6. Lutte contre les cancers
The Cancer Moonshot: Moving from Planning to Research [NCI] Currently, most of fiscal years’ 2017 and 2018 funds have been awarded, and the next phase of the Moonshot—the research phase—is well underway.
	6.1 Observation
One in five cancer sufferers face discrimination in the workplace [The Telegraph] The number of calls to the charity from cancer victims with work-related problems rose by 74% , up from fewer than 1,000 in 2015/16 to 1,711 in the year to May. Already this calendar year, they have received 3,000.
	6.10.1 Politiques (USA)
Trump pricing plans are pretentious, could impede access, and will not help much [The Cancer Letter] The success of this plan depends on drug companies agreeing to sell their products at lower prices. If they aren’t willing to make these concessions, the private sector vendors may simply choose not to purchase them, resulting in patients being deprived of access to these drugs.
	6.12 Ethique
French science behemoth launches research-integrity office [Nature] Europe’s largest basic-research agency, the CNRS, wants to improve how it tackles misconduct investigations.
	6.5 Médecines alternatives/complémentaires
Is there such a thing as the “placebome”? [Respectful Insolence] It has to be shown that there even is such a thing as the “placebome.” That has yet to be demonstrated convincingly. What has been demonstrated is that COMT alleles can be associated with differences in drug effects and might—at best, might—be associated with more response to placebo. It’s a lot of correlation, and no evidence for causation.
	6.7 DMP, Big Data & applis
Patient-driven efforts to liberate clinical cancer genomic data [OSF Preprints] While this experiment exposed multiple difficulties for patient genomic data access, we argue that these difficulties can be overcome with a patient-centered platform to facilitate these efforts. Toward that end, we propose and describe a patient-driven cancer genome collective to directly address this need and empower data liberation and donation to advance cancer research and patient empowerment.
	6.7.1 IA/bioinformatique
Improved Grading of Prostate Cancer Using Deep Learning [Google AI Blog] We developed a deep learning system (DLS) that mirrors a pathologist’s workflow by first categorizing each region in a slide into a Gleason pattern, with lower patterns corresponding to tumors that more closely resemble normal prostate glands. The DLS then summarizes an overall Gleason grade group based on the two most common Gleason patterns present.
Artificial intelligence can entrench disparities—here’s what we must do [The Cancer Letter] As we know from “GIGO” (garbage in, garbage out), its applications are only as good as the data that is used to “train” the AI system. Incomplete and biased data will lead to incomplete and biased results.
	6.9 Controverses
Failure: The Real Secret Sauce of Engineering [Omics! Omics!] So now the question: how do you analyze such a failure? When a bridge fails one can look at footage of the failure, at the wrecked parts and at design documents. One can look for clear structural alterations, sloppy construction or environmental effects. But how could this be applied to the IPI-926 pancreatic trial failure? Even if you could get biopsies from every patient -- not an easy task given they would likely all be post mortem - -what would you look for?