The phase III global ASPIRE trial documented an “unprecedented” duration of remission in relapsed multiple myeloma patients receiving carfilzomib (Kyprolis) plus a standard-of-care doublet, according to Keith Stewart, MB, ChB, Professor of Medicine at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona, who...
Two years ago, my son was diagnosed with the rare vascular sarcoma epithelioid hemangioendothelioma, on which there is incredibly little reseach and knowledge (see here for more on this rare cancer). PubMed revealed a “characteristic” description: unpredictable behavior, no correlation with...
Epithelioid hemangioendothelioma is a rare and devastating vascular sarcoma that affects between 100 and 200 people, mostly young adults, each year in the United States. The cancer may arise as a solitary lesion but more commonly presents with metastatic involvement, usually in the liver and lungs. ...
“People with a high genetic propensity to obesity have higher risks of esophageal metaplasia and neoplasia than people with a low genetic propensity,” according to analyses of data from the Barrett’s and Esophageal Adenocarcinoma Genetic Susceptibility Study. “These analyses provide the strongest...
Patients with unresectable stage III or IV melanoma treated with ipilimumab (Yervoy) plus sargramostim (Leukine) had longer overall survival and less toxicity than did those treated with ipilimumab alone, according to a phase II randomized clinical trial conducted by the Eastern Cooperative...
Artificial antigen-presenting cells have been shown to stimulate antigen-specific T-cell responses, but their effect in vivo may be compromised by rapid macrophage clearance. In a study reported in Clinical Cancer Research, Bruns and colleagues added CD47 to classic two-signal artificial...
The oncoprotein and transcription factor MYB is overexpressed in colorectal cancer and critical to proliferation and tumor cell survival. In a study reported in Clinical & Translational Immunology, Cross and colleagues developed a DNA vaccine to generate an MYB-specific immune response on the...
The novelty of our approach is that we are going to be using multiple modalities” to study the effects of chemotherapy and hormonal therapy on the brain, looking for structural changes within the brain and how these changes might affect psychomotor function, particularly upper-extremity movements...
Friends of Cancer Research, in conjunction with the Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform at Brookings, recently held the seventh annual Conference on Clinical Cancer Research in Washington, DC. The panels that comprised the daylong meeting discussed a future that has already begun. The most...
Nearly 5,000 scientific abstracts were presented at the 2014 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting and Exhibition in San Francisco. Along with our targeted coverage of the meeting’s key newsmakers, The ASCO Post provides you with these brief reports of other interesting...
Researchers from Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida have participated in a global effort that has identified six new regions of the genome that increase risk of epithelial ovarian cancer, according to a news release from Moffitt. The collaborative study was published recently in Nature...
At the 2014 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, a research team led by Michael Dixon, MD, of Western General Hospital in Edinburgh, shed light on the development of endocrine resistance and presented a four-gene messenger RNA (mRNA) profile that can predict response to letrozole with a high degree ...
The Conquer Cancer Foundation of ASCO has announced the five recipients of the 2015 International Innovation Grant. This grant supports novel and innovative projects that may improve diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of cancer in low- and middle-income countries. For 2015, the 1-year grants of...
Radical cystectomy is the standard therapeutic option for patients with muscle-invasive bladder cancer. However, 5-year overall survival for high-risk patients with pT3, pT4, pN-negative, and pN-positive M0 bladder cancer after radical cystectomy is only about 50% and ranges from 32% in patients...
Treatment of advanced bladder cancer continues to prove challenging, and therapies that offer long-term survival remain elusive. The ASCO Post recently spoke with Derek Raghavan, MD, PhD, FACP, FRACP, FASCO, President of the Levine Cancer Center, Charlotte, North Carolina, about the current state...
Inotuzumab ozogamicin combined with a low-intensity chemotherapy called mini-hyper-CVD achieved highly encouraging results in older patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) in a phase II study reported at the 56th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Hematology.1 After the...
As more experience is gained with the use of genetically engineered chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells in patients with leukemia, the data continue to be highly encouraging. Three different groups using slightly different modifications of CAR T cells reported positive experiences in treating...
An investigational class of agents in multiple myeloma, the anti-CD38 monoclonal antibodies, could be the next blockbusters in this malignancy, myeloma experts predicted at the 56th American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting and Exposition. Anti-CD38 antibodies target multiple myeloma...
It is not enough for Mary-Claire King, PhD, to have identified the germline BRCA1 mutation associated with hereditary breast and ovarian cancers. Her clinically applicable discovery is one of the world’s greatest in genetics and one for which she has been highly lauded. But not one to rest on her...
An update of clinical trial E1199 showed that weekly paclitaxel and every-3-week docetaxel were both more effective than every-3-week paclitaxel in preventing deaths and tumor recurrences, according to Joseph Sparano, MD, Professor of Medicine and Women’s Health at the Albert Einstein College of...
The androgen receptor inhibitor enzalutamide (Xtandi) showed encouraging activity as a single agent in advanced triple-negative breast cancer patients expressing the androgen receptor, according to an international study presented at the 2014 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.1 Enzalutamide...
A less intensive regimen of nab-paclitaxel (Abraxane) plus gemcitabine appears to be as efficacious as the standard regimen in first-line treatment for metastatic pancreatic cancer, but less toxic and far less expensive, according to a study that earned a Merit Award at the 2015 Gastrointestinal...
ASCO recently released its report, Clinical Cancer Advances 2015: An Annual Report on Progress Against Cancer, and for the first time announced its cancer Advance of the Year: gains made in the treatment of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). The report credited improvements in CLL care with four...
At the 2014 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, The ASCO Post sat down with geneticist Mary-Claire King, PhD, for some personal musings about her career and how she might guide young researchers who want to follow in her footsteps. Dr. King is known for a variety of accomplishments in genetics,...
Some patients with rectal cancer who achieve a complete response to neoadjuvant chemoradiation therapy can be monitored for tumor recurrence and may never need surgery, according to a retrospective review from patients at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, presented at the 2015...
Howard A. Fine, MD, has been appointed to lead the newly established neuro-oncology program at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, effective February 2. He will serve as Director of the Brain Tumor Center and Associate Director for Translational Research in the Sandra and...
ASCO has announced the appointment of David Kerr, MD, DSc, as founding Editor-in-Chief of the Society’s new Journal of Global Oncology (JGO). Dr. Kerr will set the editorial scope and vision for JGO, an online-only, open-access journal, which will focus on cancer care, research, and care-delivery...
A special report in The New England Journal of Medicine concluded that atypical hyperplasia of the breast “confers an absolute risk of later breast cancer of 30% at 25 years of follow-up.1” This is higher than previously recognized, and the report’s authors urged “more intensive screening and...
Atypical hyperplasia of the breast has “special importance as a predictor of future breast cancer,” according to a special report in The New England Journal of Medicine.1 That special importance is based on the high incidence of atypical hyperplasia—found in around 10% of the 1 million breast...
Funded by a grant from the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the Screening for Psychosocial Distress Program is a joint project of Yale University School of Nursing and the American Psychosocial Oncology Society (APOS). The Screening for Psychosocial Distress Program trains cancer care providers on...
In 1995, I was diagnosed with advanced colorectal cancer and given little chance to live. The dire diagnosis came years after being assured by several physicians that the problem I was having with rectal bleeding and anemia was nothing more than the result of an internal hemorrhoid. Busy raising...
In the Clinic provides overviews of novel oncology agents, addressing indications, mechanisms, administration recommendations, safety profiles, and other essential information needed for the appropriate clinical use of these drugs. On December 3, 2014, blinatumomab (Blincyto) was granted...
In a phase III trial reported in Journal of Clinical Oncology, Joyce O’Shaughnessy, MD, of Baylor Charles A. Sammons Cancer Center, Dallas, and colleagues found that the addition of iniparib to gemcitabine and carboplatin did not improve overall survival or progression-free survival in patients...
In the Clinic provides overviews of novel oncology agents, addressing indications, mechanisms, administration recommendations, safety profiles, and other essential information needed for the appropriate clinical use of these drugs. On January 29, 2015, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)...
INSIDE THE BLACK BOX is an occasional column offering insight into the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and its policies and procedures. In this installment, former clinical pharmacology team leader Julie Bullock, PharmD, and current team leader Nitin Mehrotra, PhD, discuss how...
Case 1: Prerequisites for classification of myeloid neoplasm Question 1: Which statement is the one best explanation for the discrepancy observed between the blast percentage by bone marrow aspirate visual inspection and the flow-cytometry study? Correct Answer: C. Flow-cytometry study may not be...
The ASCO Post is pleased to introduce “Hematology Expert Review,” a new feature including a case report detailing a particular hematologic condition followed by questions. Answers to each question appear with expert commentary. In this first installment, we present two cases of older men with...
Six of the studies featured in the recently released Clinical Cancer Advances 2015: ASCO’s Annual Report on Progress Against Cancer were led by researchers that whom Conquer Cancer Foundation (CCF) funded early in their careers through its signature Young Investigator Award (YIA) and Career...
Two years ago, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME), the nonprofit organization that evaluates and accredits more than 9,000 medical residency programs in the United States, began phasing in implementation of its Next Accreditation System for graduate medical education,...
Male breast cancer represents less than 1% of all breast cancers, which partially explains why so little is known about the disease. Two presentations at the 2014 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium focused on the characteristics of male breast cancer drawn from a large international registry and...
In a study that reflected clinical practice, treatment of diffuse large B-cell lymphoma based on the results of interim positron-emission tomography (PET) was feasible; however, switching PET-positive patients to an alternative treatment still resulted in inferior treatment outcomes, and the...
Two orally administered proteasome inhibitors—oprozomib and ixazomib—looked encouraging in multiple myeloma studies presented at the 2014 ASH Annual Meeting and Exposition. Study Details for Oprozomib Oprozomib, given as a single agent in a dose-escalation study of heavily pretreated patients,...
Limited-stage nonbulky diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) carries an excellent prognosis, and radiotherapy provides no value in patients who obtain a complete response, according to the phase III 02-03 trial from the Lysa/Goelams group, presented at the 56th American Society of Hematology (ASH)...
Although the data are preliminary, single-agent AG-221 therapy targeted to the IDH2 (isocitrate dehydrogenase 2) mutation holds great promise as a nonchemotherapy approach to the treatment of advanced hematologic malignancies, including relapsed/refractory acute myelogenous leukemia (AML) and...
Sorafenib (Nexavar) added to chemotherapy improved event-free survival and relapse-free survival in younger patients with acute myeloid leukemia, according to results of the randomized, controlled phase II SORAML trial.1 However, no significant improvement in overall survival has been seen to ...
Palliation of dysphagia associated with advanced esophageal cancer can be effectively accomplished with radiotherapy alone, without the addition of chemotherapy, according to a multinational phase III study presented at the 2015 Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium.1 “There was no significant...
When melanoma patients develop metastases to the gastrointestinal (GI) tract or pancreas, resection of these lesions may improve survival, according to two single-institution studies presented at the 2015 Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium. In a study that earned a Merit Award, researchers reported ...
One of the disheartening aspects of becoming a senior medical administrator is that you have the opportunity to view the health-care system from two sides. From the Presidential suite, it is clear that there is increasing chaos in health care in the United States, characterized by blowouts of...
Commenting on the RAISE study at a press briefing held during the 2015 Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium, moderator Smitha S. Krishnamurthi, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, Cleveland, acknowledged that improvements of 1 to 2 months in...
The phase III international RAISE trial found that ramucirumab (Cyramza) extends survival when given with chemotherapy to metastatic colorectal cancer patients who progress on treatment,1 but some experts commented that “financial toxicity” might be an issue, given the modest benefit. “The RAISE...