Jennifer Valerin, MD, PhD , board-certified medical oncologist, attended the 2025 ASCO Annual Meeting to engage with cutting-edge advancements in cancer care. Among the highlights she noted was the PANOVA-3 trial, which evaluated the use of Tumor Treating Fields (TTFields), a noninvasive, wearable technology that emits low-intensity electric fields to disrupt cancer cell division, when combined with standard chemotherapy for locally advanced pancreatic cancer.
The trial showed encouraging results: patients receiving TTFields alongside chemotherapy achieved a median overall survival of 14 months, compared to 12 months with standard therapy alone. The study also noted a reduction in pain, indicating potential quality-of-life benefits.
Good morning everybody. I'm Jennifer Valoran. I'm a hepatobiliary medical oncologist at UC Irvine. Um, I'm here at ASCO 2025, and today is Monday. We're almost done with the conference, uh, and I'm excited to talk to you guys about um what we've learned so far. So, um, you know, because I'm a. Medical oncologist, most of my interest is in pancreas cancer, cholangiocarcinoma and hepatocellular carcinoma. I also do some colorectal, of course, as well. Uh, the things that I found interesting in pancreatic cancer, we had a great session yesterday. Um, where we reviewed a couple of studies including the Pinova 3 trial. In the Pinova 3 trial it's, it's very unique and interesting. It's where we use tumor, um, uh, treatment tumor, um, fields or tumor treatment fields, uh, in order to, um, in, in combination with gem cytabine and nab Paclitaxel, which are of course some standard of care chemotherapy, um, the patients wear these, uh, I guess equipment, um, that. that is supposed to produce these fields that have anti-cancer properties. It's already being currently used in glioblastoma and some other cancers and actually showed a positive overall survival, albeit still relatively low, but 14 versus 12 months. The most important thing that I think I gained though from the presentation is that patients did seem to experience less pain, which. Very important in pancreatic cancer is that's a limiting limiting effect of the cancer that patients really suffer from. So I think that that was really interesting. The downside though is that most patients, the goal was to use for 18 hours at a time. So as you can imagine, using no piece of equipment on your body for 18 hours can be relatively trying. So some patients did of course have skin side effects, for example. The other the other thing that I think was interesting in the field of colorectal cancer, of course, was at the plenary session where we reviewed the atomic trial. This is an MSI high colorectal cancer, so those patients who have defects and mismatch repair, and in those patients it was also a positive study. However, um the the patients used single. Agent PD one therapy and I think that the main criticism of the trial was that um we would have you know we we already have knowledge that patients are gonna do well with immunotherapy um not we didn't know in the adjuvant setting which is where they're using a teallizumab in this case um however um I would have really liked to have seen an arm potentially with combined immunotherapy um. In that case, however, it is a little bit difficult because it is still a population of patients that does very well just as far as you know a prognostic patient population has a good overall prognostic. Uh, you know, effect from the mismatch repair defect, so it's hard to give patients additional immunotherapy when they're already doing very well and so you know giving potentially life threatening side effects of combined immunotherapy. So I'd like to, you know, just hear maybe a little bit more data in the future maybe if we redesign trials in that way and consider giving combined immunotherapy um in the patient population and see where we get in the future.
