To help patients understand what these recent ovarian cancer findings could mean in real-world care, we asked Dr. Kari Hacker, gynecologic oncologist and Associate Professor of Medicine at the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, to explain two phase III ovarian cancer trials presented at the ASCO 2026 Annual Meeting.
Below, she shares why the ROSELLA and CHIPRO trials are generating excitement, particularly for people with platinum-resistant ovarian cancer.
The transcript below has been lightly edited for clarity and grammar.
Inside the ROSELLA trial
Dr. Kari Hacker: Traditionally, platinum-resistant ovarian cancer, which is ovarian cancer that comes back within six months of completing platinum-based chemotherapy, has been a challenge to treat.
It’s been a challenge to treat because the traditional cytotoxic chemotherapies we’ve used in the past haven’t been terribly effective. The majority of patients only get about two or three months on treatment, where the cancer is either controlled or shrinks a little bit. It’s rare for patients to have complete shrinkage of their cancer or prolonged periods where the disease remains stable. On top of that, many patients experience toxicities from these chemotherapies, so they can be difficult to tolerate and stay on.
Over the last 10 years or so, a lot of the research has focused on finding alternatives to cytotoxic chemotherapy. That includes newer classes of drugs, like antibody-drug conjugates, as well as small-molecule inhibitors that can be combined with immunotherapy or even traditional chemotherapy to improve responses while hopefully reducing some of the toxicities we see.
Any time we make progress in platinum-resistant ovarian cancer, particularly when we see an overall survival benefit, we get excited. That’s why we’re excited about the ROSELLA trial and relacorilant in particular.
The progression-free survival and overall survival data had been presented previously. This presentation focused on patients who had received taxanes before. Nab-paclitaxel is a taxane, so the question was: if patients had already received a taxane, would they still benefit from treatment with nab-paclitaxel plus relacorilant?
What they found was that it really didn’t matter whether you’d received a taxane before or not, you still saw a good benefit with treatment.
A closer examination of the CHIPRO trial
Dr. Kari Hacker: CHIPRO looked at chiauranib, a multi-tyrosine kinase inhibitor that’s given orally while patients receive weekly paclitaxel.
The idea is that this tyrosine kinase inhibitor may work synergistically with chemotherapy by reprogramming the tumor’s immune environment, while also decreasing tumor vascularization and slowing tumor growth.
The primary endpoint was progression-free survival. In the control arm, patients had a median progression-free survival of 2.7 months, compared with 4.6 months in the experimental arm.
I still think the benefit is relatively small, but it’s meaningful. About 32% of patients in the experimental arm had tumor shrinkage, compared with 14% in the control arm.
Overall survival was about 12 months in both groups, so this study didn’t appear to change how long patients lived.
One finding I thought was particularly provocative came from a subgroup analysis. Some patients with platinum-resistant ovarian cancer will receive platinum chemotherapy again later in their treatment course. The researchers found that those who had received the experimental treatment had better progression-free survival when they later went back on platinum.
To me, that suggests the treatment may be reversing some of the platinum resistance we see in platinum-resistant ovarian cancer. It may be changing the tumor’s immune environment in a way that improves outcomes. It’s not entirely clear yet, but I thought that was a particularly interesting finding.
That said, the progression-free survival in the control arm was 2.7 months, and in other studies, weekly paclitaxel has sometimes performed a little better than that. I think we need a larger study to investigate this further and determine whether this is a true benefit.
Tune into our full webinar discussion where Dr. Hacker shares additional insights on the latest ovarian cancer findings.
