Myles Brown, MD, Director of the Center for Functional Cancer Epigenetics at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, suggested the failure of the endocrine therapy to increase the pathologic complete response rates “may be related to the fact that the aromatase inhibitor was not the optimal...
The addition of estrogen deprivation to neoadjuvant chemotherapy and HER2 blockade did not enhance the achievement of pathologic complete responses in women with early-stage breast cancer, according to the results of the NRG Oncology/NSABP B-52 trial reported at the 2016 San Antonio Breast Cancer...
Press conference moderator Carlos L. Arteaga, MD, said: “This drug is not necessarily the same as palbociclib [Ibrance] or ribociclib. There are subtle differences among these three [cyclin-dependent kinase (CDK) 4/6] inhibitors. The tissue analysis provides us with an enormous opportunity to...
Young women who carry the BRCA1 and/or BRCA2 mutation and develop breast cancer seem to have similar survival compared with young women who have BRCA-negative breast cancer. However, women with BRCA-positive triple-negative breast cancer have an 11% survival advantage compared with those with...
Researchers working on whole-exome and transciptome sequencing of endocrine-resistant estrogen receptor–positive metastatic breast cancer have shown that the mutational landscape differs from that of estrogen receptor–positive primary breast cancer, and these differences have the potential to...
On Tuesday, December 13, President Obama signed into law the 21st Century Cures Act, landmark legislation designed to improve and accelerate the pace of biomedical research in the United States. ASCO Chief Executive Officer Clifford Hudis, MD, FACP, FASCO, attended the White House signing ceremony ...
On December 21, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) allowed marketing of a new tissue-expander system for soft-tissue expansion in two-stage breast reconstruction following mastectomy and in the treatment of underdeveloped breasts and soft-tissue deformities. A patient uses a dose...
“This study shows that a great deal of innovation can come from existing knowledge. The 7+3 regimen has been around since I was an intern,” admitted Armand Keating, MD, of the University of Toronto and Princess Margaret Hospital, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. “Using the liposomal formulation of...
Induction therapy with the experimental chemotherapy called CPX-351—a liposomal formulation of cytarabine and daunorubicin—outperformed standard “7+3” cytarabine plus daunorubicin by extending survival in older high-risk patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) who subsequently underwent...
Mikkael A. Sekeres, MD, MS, Director of the Leukemia Program at the Cleveland Clinic Taussig Cancer Center in Ohio, commented on vadastuximab talirine in newly diagnosed acute myeloid leukemia (AML). He noted that the drug is similar to gemtuzumab ozogamicin, another antibody-drug conjugate that...
The investigational CD33-directed antibody-drug conjugate vadastuximab talirine yielded high overall and complete response rates when combined with standard “7+3” chemotherapy for patients newly diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia.1 Results from this phase Ib study were presented at the 2016...
The following essay by Jeremy K. Hon, MD, is adapted from The Big Casino: America’s Best Cancer Doctors Share Their Most Powerful Stories, which was coedited by Stan Winokur, MD, and Vincent Coppola and published in May 2014. The book is available on Amazon.com and thebigcasino.org. As physicians, ...
“This study is important because R-CHOP [rituximab and cyclophosphamide, doxorubicin, vincristine, prednisone] has been the standard of care for many years. CHOP, the chemotherapy backbone, has withstood challenges from more aggressive regimens in the past. The excellent clinical outcomes observed ...
Monica M. Bertagnolli, MD, a long-time ASCO member and volunteer, has been elected to serve as the President of ASCO for the term beginning in June 2018. She will take office as President-Elect during the ASCO Annual Meeting in Chicago in June 2017. Additionally, three new members were elected to...
Despite the fact that 28 states and the District of Columbia have enacted laws to permit the use of cannabis and cannabinoid-based drugs to treat medical conditions, including cancer and symptoms from its treatment, federal law prohibits physicians from prescribing marijuana to their patients,...
Long-awaited results of the Cancer and Leukemia Group B (CALGB)/Alliance 50303 trial were a disappointment to many hematologists/oncologists at the 2016 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting & Exposition. The study failed to show that dose-adjusted EPOCH-R (etoposide,...
W.K. Alfred Yung, MD, has wanted a career in medicine since he was a high-school student and has spent nearly 4 decades fulfilling that dream, specifically in the research and treatment of one of the deadliest cancers, malignant brain tumor, especially glioblastoma multiforme, the most common...
Speaking about the GALLIUM study in the ASH News Daily, Brad S. Kahl, MD, of Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, commented, “It is a potentially practice-changing study that clearly shows an 8% absolute improvement in progression-free survival at 2 years for the patients getting...
On November 17, 2016, the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) issued an updated clinical practice statement for accelerated partial-breast irradiation for early-stage breast cancer. The updated guideline reflects recent evidence that greater numbers of patients may benefit from...
In a study reported in Nature Genetics, Bishoy M. Faltas, MD, of Weill Cornell Medicine, and colleagues identified factors in the clonal evolution of chemotherapy-resistant urothelial carcinoma.1 As stated by the investigators: “Chemotherapy-resistant urothelial carcinoma has no uniformly curative...
Women with hormone receptor–positive metastatic breast cancer are witnessing an unprecedented time of success in the battle against their disease. Just in the past 12 months, a number of prospective, randomized, phase III studies were reported, with positive results indicating the value of...
Sergio A. Giralt, MD, Chief of the Adult Bone Marrow Transplant Service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, and the Melvin Berlin Family Chair in Multiple Myeloma, commented on the findings of the StaMINA trial for The ASCO Post. He said the results of the largest randomized U.S....
The Conquer Cancer Foundation has an incredible opportunity for you to make an amazing impact! An anonymous donor is offering a Matching Gift Challenge, which will double the value of every gift we receive by December 31—dollar for dollar—up to $64,000! This amount is enough to fund one of our...
“In the past few years, there has been increased reporting of other, less traditional, response criteria in acute myeloid leukemia (AML), including morphologic leukemia-free state, partial response, and complete remission [or complete response] with incomplete recovery. There is some concern that...
There has been no better time than the present for women in the field of oncology: Women at all stages of their careers are finding more opportunities and avenues to excel. At the time of the last ASCO workforce survey, women made up 28.4% of the oncologist workforce, and that proportion is rising...
The importance of achieving complete response after intensive therapy in older adults with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) was confirmed in a follow-up analysis of the E2906 North American Intergroup trial.1 Patients in complete response had superior survival in this landmark analysis. This finding...
Tyrosine kinase inhibitors, such as imatinib, nilotinib (Tasigna), and dasatinib (Sprycel), have revolutionized the treatment of chronic myeloid leukemia (CML). A substantial percentage of patients achieve deep and meaningful remissions on these agents. More recently, partly driven by patients’ and ...
Although a cure for cancer remains elusive, there are many promising ideas to eradicate this disease, including the Cancer Moonshot Initiative and an ever-increasing body of cancer research that continually drives innovative treatments in an effort to improve survival and, ultimately, find a...
Michael Gnant, MD, Professor of Surgery at the Medical University of Vienna in Austria and President of the Austrian Breast & Colorectal Cancer Study Group, was the invited discussant of the three studies of extended endocrine therapy. “The trials did not reach the necessary statistical levels ...
Extended endocrine therapy with an aromatase inhibitor did not improve disease-free survival in patients with hormone receptor–positive breast cancer enrolled in three studies presented at the 2016 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium. The results stand in contrast to the phase III National Cancer...
A routine blood test may predict how long patients with cancer in palliative care will survive, researchers reported at the ESMO Asia 2016 Congress in Singapore. “Cancer patients in palliative care want honest and accurate prognostic information but this information needs to be shared...
A brain-boosting protein plays an important role in how well people respond to chemotherapy, researchers reported at the ESMO Asia 2016 Congress in Singapore. A study (Abstract 497O_PR) found that patients with cancer suffering from depression have decreased amounts of brain-derived neurotrophic...
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) today granted accelerated approval to rucaparib (Rubraca) to treat women with advanced ovarian cancer who have been treated with two or more chemotherapies and whose tumors have a specific gene mutation (deleterious BRCA) as identified by an FDA-approved...
As reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology by Gary H. Lyman, MD, of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and colleagues, an ASCO clinical practice guideline update panel made no changes to the 2014 recommendations for sentinel lymph node biopsy in women with early-stage breast cancer. The...
Translational research in pancreatic adenocarcinoma has been limited by the difficulty of obtaining sufficient quality and quantity tumor tissue from patients. A study by Pietrasz et al assessing the feasibility and prognostic value of circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) in pancreatic adenocarcinoma has...
Regorafenib (Stivarga) improved overall survival vs placebo in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma who had experienced disease progression on sorafenib (Nexavar) treatment, according to the phase III RESORCE trial reported by Bruix et al in The Lancet. Study Details In this double-blind trial, ...
Around 20% of patients with breast cancer in Sweden do not complete endocrine therapy, according to research that will be reported at the ESMO Asia 2016 Congress (Abstract 62O_PR), to be held December 16–19 in Singapore.The study in over 5,500 women found that younger patients and those who...
Studies suggest that approximately 30% to 40% of women with breast cancer report persistent hot flashes. Nocturnal hot flashes are among the most problematic because they can contribute to poor sleep. A new study published by Garland et al in Menopause shows that electroacupuncture may be effective ...
Monica M. Bertagnolli, MD, a long-time ASCO member and volunteer, has been elected to serve as the President of ASCO for the term beginning in June 2018. She will take office as President-Elect during the ASCO Annual Meeting in Chicago in June 2017. Additionally, three new members were elected to...
Patients whose lung cancer spreads to their brain typically have only 4 to 6 months left to live, but research presented by Chinese doctors suggests that using icotinib increases progression-free survival in these patients compared to whole-brain irradiation and chemotherapy combined. Yi-Long Wu,...
A revised tumor classification based on more than 70,000 non–small cell lung cancer patients and 6,100 small cell lung cancer patients is now available to lung cancer specialists around the world in the form of the 8th edition of the tumor, node, and metastasis (TNM) classification. The...
As reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology by Saro H. Armenian, DO, MPH, of City of Hope, and colleagues, ASCO has released a clinical practice guideline on prevention and monitoring of cardiac dysfunction in survivors of adult cancers. Recommendations were developed by an expert panel using a ...
Postmenopausal women with breast cancer who took aromatase inhibitors demonstrated endothelial dysfunction, a predictor of cardiovascular disease, according to study results presented at the 2016 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, held December 6 to 10 (Abstract s5-07). Aromatase inhibitors are...
The investigational immunotherapeutic IMC-20D7S was found to be well tolerated and somewhat active in patients with advanced melanoma, including one complete response, according to the results of a phase I/Ib trial reported by Danny N. Khalil, MD, PhD, and colleagues in Clinical Cancer Research....
Reports of rare, but in some cases fatal, cardiac complications when the checkpoint inhibitors ipilimumab (Yervoy) and nivolumab (Opdivo) are used in combination should be taken seriously but should not scare patients away from potentially life-saving drugs, according to Javid J. Moslehi, MD. Dr....
Cardiovascular toxicities associated with cancer treatments are not new. What is new, and what has prompted recent articles in The New England Journal of Medicine,1,2 is the explosion of cancer therapies, which has dramatically changed the natural course of many cancers but can lead to cardiac,...
Among women enrolled in the International Breast Cancer Intervention Study I (IBIS-I), those who had certain symptoms of menopause—nausea/vomiting and headaches—were significantly less likely to be adherent to the assigned medication 4.5 years after starting the treatment, according to...
Presurgical treatment with the investigational therapeutic abemaciclib, either alone or in combination with the aromatase inhibitor anastrozole, reduced levels of Ki67, a marker of cell proliferation, in hormone receptor–positive, HER2-negative breast cancer cells, compared with anastrozole...
Scientific Names: Valeriana officinalis, Valeriana radix Common Names: Garden valerian, Indian valerian, Pacific valerian, garden heliotrope Overview A perennial flowering plant prevalent in Europe, Asia, and North America, valerian has a long medicinal history as a relaxant. Its potential as a...
The investigational PI3K inhibitor buparlisib, in combination with endocrine therapy, improved outcomes for patients with hormone receptor–positive advanced breast cancer that had progressed after treatment with everolimus (Afinitor) plus exemestane, according to data from the phase III...