NANETS 2022 – Washington
Lecture Board: Jaume Capdevila, MD; Mauro Cives, MD; Ebrahim S. Delpassand, MD; Daniel DePietro, MD
Medical Writer: Júlia Melià Alomà, PhD
Publishing Editor: Anna Fenzl, PhD
Preface – NANETS 2022
Members of the professional neuroendocrine community gathered at the North American Neuroendocrine Tumor Society (NANETS) Symposium that took place in Washington, D.C., from 27th to 29th October 2022 to discuss new therapeutic options and the future of neuroendocrine tumor research.
SSTR-positive neuroendocrine tumors: peptide receptor radionuclide therapy
177Lu-DOTATATE was approved by the FDA in 2018 following the encouraging results from the NETTER-1 trial, where a regimen of 4 doses was shown to improve both progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS) compared to somatostatin analog (SSA) therapy in patients with advanced gastroenteropancreatic neuroendocrine tumors (GEP-NETs).
Advances in immunotherapy for neuroendocrine tumors
Chemotherapy is currently the SoC first-line treatment for high-grade neuroendocrine neoplasms (HG-NENs), even though it only provides modest benefits in OS and PFS. Given the lack of therapeutic options for metastatic NEN patients and the promising antitumor activity of immunotherapy demonstrated across several solid cancer types, the efficacy of pembrolizumab monotherapy was investigated in an open-label, nonrandomized phase II study in patients with metastatic extra-pulmonary HG-NEN (Ki67 >20 %).
Biomarkers: predicting response to treatment
pNETs frequently contain mutations in MEN1, ATRX, DAXX, and the PI3K/AKT/mTOR pathway. However, more data are needed to determine whether this information can predict response to standard treatments, such as CAPTEM. At NANETS 2022, Hendifar et al. presented retrospective data on 25 patients with well-differentiated grade 1 and 2 pNETs who had received CAPTEM as first- or second-line treatment and whose tumors had been molecularly characterized through next-generation sequencing (NGS).