Noted

Bristol-Myers Squibb completed its acquisition of Celgene. The $74 billion deal was finalized after the companieswon U.S. antitrust approval for their merger, with the understanding that Amgen would purchase Celgene's psoriasis drug apremilast (Otezla) for $13.4 billion.

AbbVie signed a deal with Harpoon Therapeutics worth up to $2.4 billion. The deal, which expands their existing partnership, allows AbbVie to license Harpoon's BCMA-targeting agent, HPN21,and up to six more targets.

The FDA granted accelerated approval to zanubrutinib (Brukinsa; BeiGene) to treat patients with mantle cell lymphoma who have received prior therapy. The approval was based on two single-arm studies in which the drug elicited an overall response rate of 84%. A Bruton tyrosine kinase inhibitor, zanubrutinib is the first drug developed in China to be approved by the FDA.

In the phase III POSIEDON trial, which included patients newly diagnosed with metastatic non–small cell lung cancer, AstraZeneca's PD-L1 inhibitor durvalumab (Imfinzi) plus chemotherapy significantly prolonged progression-free survival (PFS) compared with chemotherapy alone. A PFS benefit was also seen for durvalumab plus the CTLA4 inhibitor tremelimumab (AstraZeneca) and chemotherapy versus chemotherapy alone.

In its State of Lung Cancer report, The American Lung Association announced that the 5-year survival rate in lung cancer has improved over the past decade, from 17.2% to 21.7% (available at http://www.lung.org/). Per the report, more than 228,000 people will be diagnosed with lung cancer in 2019; Kentucky has the highest rate of disease, and Utah has the lowest.

U.S. patients with cancer may have an elevated risk of dying from cardiovascular disease (Eur Heart J 2019;0:1–9). Researchers compared 3.2 million patients diagnosed with cancer between 1973 and 2012 with the general population and found that patients diagnosed with cancer before age 55 were more than 10 times more likely to die from cardiovascular disease.

For more news on cancer research, visit Cancer Discovery online at http://cancerdiscovery.aacrjournals.org/CDNews.