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Khabre desk
Recent reporting, analysis and explainers from the Oncology desk.
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In the phase 2 PHERGain trial, a PET- and pathology-guided strategy had an estimated five-year invasive disease-free survival of 89.5% among patients assigned to the adaptive-treatment group who underwent surgery. Exploratory ctDNA analyses linked early clearance with higher pathological complete response rates and better five-year outcomes.
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A medRxiv analysis of 354 FDA oncology approvals from 2014 through early 2025 found surrogate endpoints had become the dominant primary measure used for approval. The authors also reported different relationships between surrogate-endpoint benefits and overall survival for immunotherapy and non-immunotherapy approvals.
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In the phase 1/2 START-001 trial, four of 27 participants at selected doses had confirmed partial responses to invikafusp alfa. The early results also supported 0.08 mg/kg as the recommended phase 2 dose.
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In the randomized AMPLIFY-7P phase 2 trial, camupepimut did not significantly improve disease-free survival across all participants after pancreatic cancer surgery. Prespecified subgroup analyses and immune-response findings provide signals for testing in a larger trial.
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A single-site phase 1 trial evaluated D2C7-ATC, an EGFR-targeted antibody-toxin conjugate, in recurrent malignant glioma. Among 72 patients with IDH-wild-type recurrent glioblastoma, median overall survival was 7.9 months.
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A medRxiv preprint reports five DNA-methylation clusters in 138 Wilms tumours and a classifier that identified WT1-driven tumours with about 90% accuracy. The researchers say using these patterns to guide genetic reanalysis uncovered previously unrecognised WT1 variants, including one that led to surveillance enrolment.
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A prospective six-patient preprint evaluated Hiporfin for fluorescence-guided surgery and cavity photodynamic therapy in recurrent glioblastoma. Fluorescence had moderate specimen-level diagnostic accuracy, with some tumour samples not fluorescing.
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A phase 1 follow-up of four patients with relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma found that one maintained a stringent complete response for 15 months. The other three progressed within five months, and median progression-free survival was 4.0 months.
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A Nature Medicine study reports that urine cell-free RNA sequencing detected localized bladder cancer with 95% sensitivity at 90% specificity. The researchers also investigated its potential for detecting residual disease and predicting response to bladder treatments.
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A medRxiv preprint describes FRANK, a neural-network classifier trained on childhood tumour and normal-tissue RNA-seq data. The authors report 98.3% overall accuracy across nine validation datasets containing 16,398 samples.
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A medRxiv preprint reports higher C-index estimates for several survival outcomes when Evo2-derived tumor-sequence features were added to existing risk models. The study analysed 102 patients with soft-tissue sarcoma and a separate 129-patient TCGA cohort; clinical use requires further validation.
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A medRxiv preprint reports that Ataraxis Breast CTX, a multimodal AI model using clinical data and H&E images, separated five-year disease-free survival in a selected group of 556 clinically high-risk, node-positive HR+/HER2- early breast cancer patients. An exploratory analysis found that everolimus benefit varied by the model’s score.
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A prospective medRxiv study of 121 adults found six anaerobic species enriched in anal squamous cell carcinoma compared with high-grade lesions. The microbial pattern persisted during follow-up and changed after treatment initiation.
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A medRxiv preprint analysing preoperative imaging from 999 people with newly diagnosed glioblastoma found that a tractography-based measure of tumour involvement across white-matter pathways was more consistently associated with overall survival than tumour volume. The finding is based on a multi-institution imaging and survival analysis, not a treatment trial.
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A medRxiv preprint compared matched blood and bone-marrow cell-free DNA from 74 people with multiple myeloma. Peripheral-blood cfDNA matched or exceeded marrow-plasma cfDNA for several genomic signals, while fragment patterns varied by sample compartment and handling.
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A Nature Medicine study reports CRISP, a clinically oriented pathology foundation model developed using more than 100,000 frozen sections, with prospective evaluation in more than 3,000 patients.