A new study reports that removing naive T cells from donated blood cells before a stem cell transplantation may be a way to prevent chronic graft-versus-host disease (GVHD). In three small clinical trials, only 7% of people who received a naive T cell–depleted transplant developed chronic GVHD, compared with more than 40% of people who received stem cell transplants in the past at the same cancer center.
Adding durvalumab (Imfinzi) to standard chemotherapy modestly extended how long people with advanced biliary tract cancer lived, results from the TOPAZ-1 trial show. The immunotherapy drug may become a standard first-line therapy for this hard-to-treat cancer.
NCI researchers have shown that an experimental form of immunotherapy that uses a person's own tumor-fighting immune cells could be used to treat people with metastatic breast cancer who have exhausted all other treatment options.
Clinical Trials Information for Patients and Caregivers
Clinical trials to test new cancer treatments involve a series of steps, called phases. If a new treatment is successful in one phase, it will proceed to further testing in the next phase.
Randomization, in which people are assigned to groups by chance alone, helps prevent bias. Bias occurs when a trial's results are affected by human choices or other factors not related to the treatment being tested.
This phase 1/2 trial will test the safety and tolerability of abemaciclib (Verzenio) for people aged 12 or older with a disease called neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1) who have nerve tumors (atypical neurofibromas). Researchers will determine the best dose of the therapy and assess whether abemaciclib causes the tumors to shrink or disappear.
This phase 2 trial will test a new method for blood-forming stem cell transplantation from healthy donors to patients with a rare type of lymphoma. Patients with relapsed or resistant peripheral T-cell lymphoma will undergo either reduced-intensity conditioning therapy or immunosuppression only prior to transplantation.
This phase 1 trial will test an immune checkpoint inhibitor treatment, either nivolumab (Opdivo) or pembrolizumab (Keytruda), given at different dosing intervals for people with advanced or metastatic cancers. Doctors want to determine if giving the drugs at longer intervals between doses works differently than giving them at the standard intervals.
