In the News

Drug resistance is a formidable challenge in cancer treatment. A drug called enasidenib (Idhifa®) was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration last year for the treatment of people with a form of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) that’s driven by a mutation in the gene IDH2. About 15 percent of people with AML have this mutation. Research led by Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) reports that people who take enasidenib can develop resistance to it — in a way never seen before. Enasidenib works differently than most cancer drugs. Rather than killing leukemia cells, it turns them into normal blood cells. The discovery of this unique resistence may lead to more-precise treatments for people with AML in the future.

Immunotherapy pioneers Michel Sadelain, MD, PhD, of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK), and Carl June, MD, of the University of Pennsylvania, have published a seminal review of the current landscape of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) therapy in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). In the comprehensive review article, Drs. Sadelain and June highlight the emerging immunotherapy treatment for hematologic cancers known as CAR T cells, which was developed at MSK. The paper is the first in a series being published by NEJM. Known as Frontiers in Medicine, it will showcase ways that new technologies are influencing contemporary medicine and science.

New researched published in the New England Journal of Medicine and conducted by Memorial Sloan Kettering researchers offer proof of better treatment options for patients with advanced hepatocellular carcinoma the most common form of liver cancer.

An international team of researchers led by Howard Scher, MD, Co-Chair of the Center for Mechanism Based Therapy and Head of the Biomarker Development Initiative at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK), has validated a biomarker that can predict whether people with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) may live longer if they are treated with a taxane-based chemotherapy instead of a second targeted androgen receptor–signaling inhibitor (ARSi).