Meeting with a medical physicist who can explain how radiation therapy is planned and delivered may reduce patient anxiety and increase patient satisfaction throughout the treatment process, according to a new study published by Burmeister et al in the International Journal of Radiation Oncology •...
The Republic of Austria is a high-income, landlocked country in south-central Europe and has been a member of the European Union since 1995.1 Vienna, the capital city of nearly 2 million people, is regularly ranked among the most livable cities in the world.2 The total population of Austria is more ...
In 2000, the da Vinci Surgical System broke new ground by becoming the first robotic surgery system approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for general laparoscopic surgery. In its early years, robot-assisted radical prostatectomy was characterized by some in the surgical community as an...
In our continuing effort to connect and learn more about our international oncology colleagues, The ASCO Post recently spoke with Rossana Berardi, MD, Professor in Medical Oncology and Director of the Postgraduate School of Oncology at the Università Politecnica Marche, Ancona, Italy, where she is...
In this installment of the Living a Full Life series, Guest Editor Jame Abraham, MD, FACP, spoke with William L. Dahut, MD, who is currently serving as Chief Scientific Officer for the American Cancer Society (ACS). In this role, Dr. Dahut manages all pieces of the organization’s discovery work,...
Richter transformation, usually a diffuse large B-cell lymphoma developing in a person with CLL, remains a challenging entity, but novel regimens look promising, as described at the 2022 Pan Pacific Lymphoma Conference by Matthew S. Davids, MD, MMSc, Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard...
New research from Yale Cancer Center reveals a higher risk of cancer mortality in incarcerated adults, as well as among those diagnosed with cancer in the first year after release from prison. The findings were published in the journal PLoS One.1 “Cancer is the leading cause of death among people...
Three negative phase III trials presented at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress 2022 may dampen enthusiasm for immunotherapy as adjuvant therapy for renal cell carcinoma (RCC). None of the three trials—CheckMate 914, IMmotion010, and PROSPER—met its primary endpoint.1-3 The...
It has been well documented that breast cancer is the most common malignancy in adolescent and young adult (AYA) women aged 15 to 39 years, accounting for 30% of cancers among this population.1 In addition, 5.6% of all invasive breast cancers occur in AYA women.1 A presentation by Rebecca H....
Adding stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) to systemic therapy with sorafenib for patients with advanced hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) may extend overall survival and delay tumor progression without compromising patients’ quality of life, findings from the randomized phase III NRG...
The National Cancer Institute (NCI) chose Augusto Ochoa, MD, of Louisiana State University (LSU) Health, as the 2022 recipient of the Harry Hynes Award for Outstanding Contributions to Clinical Trials and Community Research. The award was presented during the NCI Community Oncology Research Program ...
In a preplanned analysis of the PALLAS trial, the addition of adjuvant palbociclib to standard endocrine therapy did not improve outcomes over endocrine therapy alone in patients with stage IIA breast cancer. Palbociclib offered no additional benefit in terms of invasive disease–free survival (the...
For advanced breast cancer that is hormone receptor–positive and HER2-negative, sacituzumab govitecan-hziy significantly reduced the risk of disease progression by 34% over physician’s choice of treatment, based on the results of the phase III TROPiCS-02 trial.1 The heavily pretreated patients in...
The past year has seen an unprecedented number of practice-changing advances across all three major breast cancer subtypes. For patients with early-stage triple-negative breast cancer, neoadjuvant chemotherapy plus pembrolizumab firmly entered the standard of care based on improvements in...
The invited discussant of the TUXEDO-1 trial1 was Mafalda Oliveira, MD, PhD, of Vall d’Hebron University Hospital and Vall d’Hebron Institute of Oncology, Barcelona. Dr. Oliveira noted that 40% of the 15 patients in TUXEDO-1 had symptomatic disease, and 60% had central nervous system metastases...
Invited discussant Patricia LoRusso, DO, PhD, of Yale School of Medicine, said to the assembled audience at the 2022 ASCO Annual Meeting: “I see you are as excited about these data as I am,” after the applause ended following Dr. Modi’s presentation. “I want to thank our colleagues for helping to...
The antibody-drug conjugate fam-trastuzumab deruxtecan-nxki (T-DXd) doubled progression-free survival compared with chemotherapy alone in patients with “HER2-low” metastatic breast cancer—ie, patients with low levels of HER2 expression. The agent also extended overall survival for patients with low ...
Datopotamab deruxtecan, an antibody-drug conjugate directed against trophoblast cell surface antigen-2 (Trop-2), is showing promise as a treatment for relapsed or refractory advanced triple-negative breast cancer, according to early findings from the phase I TROPION-PanTumor01 trial presented...
Amy Tiersten, MD, Professor of Medicine, Hematology, and Medical Oncology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Carlos L. Arteaga, MD, Director of the Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center and Associate Dean of Oncology at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas,...
Angela DeMichele, MD, MSCE, the Alan and Jill Miller Professor in Breast Cancer Excellence at the Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, commented on NIMBUS1 for The ASCO Post. She said obtaining information on tumor mutational burden is simple, as it is part ...
“OlympiA is clearly a practice-changing trial, and olaparib should be offered to patients meeting the entry criteria for the study,” said Mark E. Robson, MD, Chief of the Breast Medicine Service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York. Dr. Robson was invited to discuss the findings of...
The OlympiA trial of adjuvant olaparib in patients with HER2-negative, high-risk early-stage breast cancer and BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations has now demonstrated a significant overall survival benefit, reducing the risk of death over placebo by 32% and yielding an absolute improvement of 3.8% at 3...
New drugs for HER2-positive breast cancer are able to overcome some of the obstacles that have made brain metastases challenging to treat, according to Mark Pegram, MD, the Susy Yuan-Huey Hung Professor of Oncology at Stanford University School of Medicine in California, who described the promising ...
Longer-term follow-up of the global phase III monarchE trial showed an increasing benefit for adding abemaciclib to endocrine therapy in the adjuvant treatment of early high-risk hormone receptor–positive, HER2-negative breast cancer, regardless of Ki67 index. The latest findings were reported at a ...
Researchers have unmasked mutations in the RNF43 gene as predictive biomarkers of a response to treatment with anti-BRAF/EGFR combination therapy in patients with microsatellite-stable BRAF V600E–mutated metastatic colorectal cancer. Data showed that patients with tumors harboring loss-of-function...
Treatment with neoadjuvant immunotherapy in colon cancer resulted in major pathologic responses in 95% of patients, NICHE-2 investigators reported at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress 2022.1 Additionally, after 4 weeks of nivolumab plus ipilimumab, 67% of patients with...
The addition of 24 months of androgen-deprivation therapy to postoperative radiotherapy after radical prostatectomy provided a metastasis-free survival benefit and improved the time to salvage therapy in patients with prostate cancer, according to the preliminary results from the RADICALS-HD trial...
Just 1 month after the DESTINY-Breast04 data were presented at the 2022 ASCO Annual Meeting Plenary Session,1 an ASCO expert panel released updated guidance that endorses the adoption of the antibody-drug conjugate fam-trastuzumab deruxtecan-nxki (T-DXd) into clinical practice for patients with...
Although standard therapies may provide long-lasting remissions for many patients with various subtypes of lymphoma, there is a critical need for new strategies for the sizable high-risk subset. At the 2022 Pan Pacific Lymphoma Conference, four experts in the field described future therapies for...
TROPiCS-02 is a statistically positive trial, with the primary endpoint met and also now with an overall survival gain of 3.2 months,” said the study’s invited discussant Meritxell Bellet Ezquerra, MD, PhD, a senior researcher at the Vall d’Hebron Institute of Oncology, Barcelona. “TROPiCS-02 is...
An overall survival benefit has now emerged for sacituzumab govitecan-hziy in women with previously treated, hormone receptor–positive/HER2-negative, locally recurrent, inoperable or metastatic breast cancer, according to a planned second interim analysis of the phase III TROPiCS-02 trial.1 The...
Formal discussant of this study, Suzette Delaloge, MD, MSc, of Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France, stated: “This is a big step forward and an amazing set of new knowledge. This presentation is a meaningful demonstration of the role of PM2.5 [particulate matter 2.5 µm in diameter] air pollutants in...
The legal climate surrounding reproductive health care and fertility preservation has changed drastically since the June 2022 Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v Wade, which revoked the constitutional right to abortion. With this ruling, individual state legislatures are now able to pass laws...
After my first breast cancer diagnosis, in 2010, the odds for a cure were seemingly all weighted in my favor. A routine mammogram screening had picked up a small—less than 1 cm—mass in my right breast, and a tissue biopsy confirmed it was stage I estrogen receptor–positive breast cancer. I had no...
1980–1995, Villejeuf: Claud Jasmin, MD, advocates for the elimination of chronologic age from the eligibility criteria for clinical trials of cancer treatment. In 1995, Dr. Jasmin published a book entitled La Planète Blanche [The White Planet], where he foresaw challenges in a world crowded with...
With the aging of the world population, geriatric oncology is becoming a mainstay. Over the past year in The ASCO Post, we published a couple of articles on the history of oncology, including one on the history of geriatric oncology in the United States and Europe. Our goal was to promote a...
In the more than 7 months since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, cancer care for Ukrainian citizens has changed dramatically. Ukraine was once a country able to provide its approximately 160,000 newly diagnosed patients with cancer each year with modern diagnostic methods, including...
An advanced software tool for analyzing DNA sequences from tumor samples has uncovered new, likely cancer-driving genes. In a study, Weill Cornell Medicine researchers designed the software, known as CSVDriver, to map and analyze the locations of large mutations, known as structural variants, in...
A research team led by Matthias Preusser, MD, PhD, Professor of Medical Oncology and Head of the Clinical Division of Oncology at the Medical University of Vienna, had already demonstrated that patients with cancer may benefit from a third vaccination to protect them against COVID-19. A recent...
On September 28, the Lasker Foundation announced the winners of the 2022 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, the 2022 Lasker~DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award, and the 2022 Lasker~Bloomberg Public Service Award. Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award Richard O. Hynes, PhD, of the...
This is Part 2 of Updates in Renal Cell Carcinoma, a four-part video roundtable series. Scroll down to watch the other videos from this Roundtable. In this video, Drs. Wenxin (Vincent) Xu, David Braun, and Bradley McGregor discuss second-line therapy and beyond in clear cell renal cell carcinoma...
A cancer navigation program can reduce overall costs when deployed in collaboration with a statewide Medicare Advantage health plan across a wide range of practice types, according to findings to be presented by Worland et al at the upcoming 2022 ASCO Quality Care Symposium (Abstract 4). A...
In this installment of the Living a Full Life series, Guest Editor Jame Abraham, MD, FACP, spoke with Stanton (“Stan”) L. Gerson, MD, Dean and Senior Vice President for Medical Affairs, School of Medicine, and Acting Director of the Case Comprehensive Cancer Center and National Center for...
Despite a significant potential for cure, relapsed and refractory large B-cell lymphomas (LBCL) comprise the most common cause of lymphoma-related mortality. Sequential relapses reflect the limits of repeated exposure to chemotherapy, even when delivered at high doses. More than 30 years ago,...
ASCO and the Association of Community Cancer Centers (ACCC) jointly released two resources to help research sites increase racial and ethnic equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) in cancer clinical trials. The Just ASK™ Increasing Diversity in Cancer Clinical Research: An ACCC-ASCO Training...
Globally, the population is aging, with the number of people aged 60 and older projected to double from 1 billion worldwide in 2020 to 2.1 billion by 2050. Given the aging population, coupled with the risk of cancer increasing with age, an exponential rise in cases of older adults diagnosed with...
From microchips to automobiles, people in the United States are experiencing shortages of all kinds of products, and oncology treatments are no exception. In particular, shortages related to chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy have been reported, most acutely, for B-cell maturation...
The European Society For Medical Oncology (ESMO) launched its annual congress, held September 9–13, 2022, just as this issue of The ASCO Post was going to press. Watch upcoming issues for comprehensive coverage of the live congress, following 2 years of virtual meetings and remote presentations due ...
Three-quarters of surveyed people preferred to do a fecal immunochemical test (FIT) rather than undergo a colonoscopy for their regular colorectal cancer screening, according to a new Cedars-Sinai study published by Makaroff et al in Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology. “One of the big issues...
Little is known about patients with cancer’s social welfare and how it affects their health outcomes. To address this, researchers at University of California (UC) San Diego School of Medicine and partnering institutions assessed the prevalence and impact of various social risk factors in patients...