Noted

The European Commission blocked Illumina's $8 billion acquisition of GRAIL, which the companies announced in 2020. The deal “would have enabled and incentivized Illumina to foreclose GRAIL's rivals, who are dependent on Illumina's techno­logy, from access to an essential input they need to develop and market their own tests.” Illumina makes next-generation sequencing systems; GRAIL is developing blood tests to aid early cancer detection.

In an international phase II clinical trial, 63.3% of 79 patients with stage II–IV cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma had their tumors nearly or completely eradicated with neoadjuvant cemiplimab (Libtayo; Regeneron/Sanofi), researchers reported at the ESMO 2022 Congress; results were simultaneously published (N Engl J Med 2022 Sep 12 [Epub ahead of print]). Study presenter Neil Gross, MD, of The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston said that “if you can avoid radiation or have a smaller surgery, and you can keep your eye, ear, or nose, that's a huge win for people.”

The FDA approved durvalumab (Imfinzi; AstraZeneca) plus gemcitabine and cisplatin for certain biliary tract cancers (BTC). The decision was based on the phase III TOPAZ-1 trial, in which 685 patients with locally advanced inoperable or metastatic BTC who had not received systemic therapy received all three drugs or a placebo plus gemcitabine and cisplatin. Median overall survival was 12.8 months and 11.5 months in the dur­va­lumab and placebo arms, respectively.

U.S. President Joe Biden appointed Renee Wegrzyn, PhD, as the first director of the Advanced Res­earch Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), which was created in 2020 to drive bio­medical innovation and research on some of the most intractable diseases, including cancer. Currently working at Ginkgo Bioworks, Wegrzyn previously served as a program manager at the Defense Ad­vanced Research Projects Agency, an institution that inspired ARPA-H's creation.

The American Association for Cancer Research released its 12th annual Cancer Progress Report, which provides cancer incidence, mortality, and survivorship statistics and discusses the latest research in cancer biology, detection, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention (https://cancerprogressreport.aacr.org).

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