Thyroid Cancer Research and Treatment Highlights
Thyroid Cancer Research and Treatment Highlights from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
What are the latest thyroid cancer research and treatment highlights? Dr. Lori Wirth discusses recent advancements, including successful clinical trials with newer therapies, and ongoing research into the latest targeted treatments for advanced thyroid cancer.
Dr. Lori Wirth is the Medical Director of the Center for Head and Neck Cancers at Massachusetts General Hospital. Learn more about Dr. Wirth.
See More from Evolve Thyroid Cancer
Related Resources:
|
What Questions Should You Ask About a Proposed Thyroid Cancer Treatment Plan? |
What Are the Benefits of Thyroid Cancer Clinical Trial Participation? |
Transcript:
Katherine:
Dr. Wirth, what are your research areas of focus?
Dr. Wirth:
Here at Mass General in Boston we focus on clinical trials looking at new therapies for patients with advanced thyroid cancer including iodine refractory thyroid cancer, anaplastic thyroid cancer, medullary thyroid cancer.
We also have a big program in studying in the laboratory what makes thyroid cancers tick in order to try to come up with new angles for new drug therapies based on preclinical work that’s being done.
Katherine:
Okay. In terms of thyroid cancer are there research developments that are showing a lot of promise that you’re excited about?
Dr. Wirth:
And so, Katherine, I’m so glad you’re asking that question because we’ve actually had some really big successes in clinical trials for patients with thyroid cancer recently. One of the big successes was a study called COSMIC-311 which looked at the drug cabozantinib (Cabometyx) in patients with iodine refractory thyroid cancer who had progressed on the first-line therapy.
Most commonly that’s lenvatinib (Lenvima), but you can have other first-line therapies as well. And that study was a randomized Phase III study that was done in an international setting and showed that cabozantinib had very good activity in the second line following progression on first-line therapy.
So, we now have treatments lined up for patients for the first line, but then also we have good treatment for patients who’ve progressed on the first-line therapy and need further treatment. So, that was one major success. Another major success recently was the LIBRETTO-531 trial. So, that was a randomized Phase III trial also done internationally in patients with progressive RET-mutated medullary thyroid cancer.
And that study randomized patients to receive either the RET specific therapy selpercatinib compared to a multikinase inhibitor either cabozantinib or vandetanib (Caprelsa). And the LIBRETTO-531 study showed that selpercatinib is much better than the older standard of care therapies in terms of response rates, durability of response. And we’re even seeing that it looks like there’s a signal where the overall survival is longer with serpercatinib compared to the older standard of care therapies.
So, whenever we have a strongly positive Phase II trial in oncology it’s a big win. And those are two examples of big wins recently. Another study that I would highlight has come out of Germany looking at the combination of pembrolizumab which is an immunotherapy drug in combination with lenvatinib the multikinase inhibitor in patients with anaplastic thyroid cancer.
And it was a relatively small study. It was a Phase II trial, but this Phase II trial in Germany showed very good activity with this combination of pembrolizumab (Keytruda) and lenvatinib in people with anaplastic thyroid cancer. So, that is very promising for the future for those patients as well.
Katherine:
Dr. Wirth, is there anything you’d like to add about the evolution of thyroid cancer care? Are you excited about anything that we haven’t already talked about?
Dr. Wirth:
I am so excited about our recent evolution in thyroid cancer care where we’ve gone from only having old fashioned IV chemotherapy which really doesn’t work very well in thyroid cancer to having really effective multikinase inhibitors for thyroid cancer patients. And now we even have gene specific targeted therapies that work even better in certain specific situations. And so, this evolution over the last 10 years has really changed the landscape of therapies available to our patients. And we now have drugs for almost all of our patients with thyroid cancer.
They have a good likelihood of working really well for a really long period of time. And that’s changed in my lifetime, taking care of people with thyroid cancer. And the progress that we’ve seen in the last 10 years is really only accelerating before our very eyes. One of the targets that we didn’t talk about earlier is the BRAF V600E mutation.
And I just want to talk about that very briefly because that’s actually the most common potentially targetable gene alteration in thyroid cancer. But thyroid cancer patients share that gene mutation with other cancers as well including melanoma, a subset of people with lung cancer, a subset of people with colorectal cancer as well. There are a lot of new drugs that are being studied in clinical trials targeting that BRAF V600E mutation and other cousins within that pathway of gene alterations that drive cancers.
And so there is a very active industry that is working on developing the next best therapy for all of these targets that we’ve talked about, NTRK, RET, BRAF mutations, immunotherapy approaches to people with all different types of solid tumors. And those kinds of clinical trials are being done now in advanced thyroid cancer.
Whereas 15 years ago it was really difficult to get a trial up and running for people with thyroid cancer because it was seen as such a rare cancer, kind of a niche cancer where there’s not a lot of money to be made in developing drugs compared to the numbers of women with breast cancer or numbers of people with lung cancer.
It’s a different story now. There’s a lot of active drug development specifically for people with thyroid cancer.
