Detection of EGFR mutations in circulating tumor (ct) DNA from plasma samples can be accomplished using the cobas platform, according to findings presented by Kumar et al at the 2017 European Lung Cancer Conference (ELCC) (Abstract 95PD). Assays of ctDNA offer a noninvasive method of finding EGFR...
On March 23, 2017, avelumab (Bavencio) was granted accelerated approval for treatment of patients aged ≥ 12 years with metastatic Merkel cell carcinoma. Avelumab is the first U.S. Food and Drug Administration–approved product to treat this disease.1,2 Supporting Efficacy Data Approval was based on ...
The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS) together with the National Black Church Initiative (NBCI) announced the launch of a church-based initiative addressing striking health-care disparities among African Americans with multiple myeloma. Black Americans have twice the incidence of multiple...
Minimal residual disease is a promising biomarker for guiding the management of multiple myeloma that is becoming increasingly important with the advent of more efficacious therapies, according to emerging data and expert opinion. “The story of minimal residual disease in multiple myeloma is like...
An investigational immunotherapy is improving outcomes in difficult-to-treat acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) and showing promise in other cancers, as well. Blinatumomab (Blincyto), the first U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved bispecific T-cell engager (BiTE), has demonstrated...
Ensartinib demonstrated intracranial responses in patients with anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK)–positive non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and central nervous system (CNS) metastases, according to findings presented by Reckamp et al at the 2017 European Lung Cancer Conference (ELCC)...
From immunomodulatory agents and proteasome inhibitors to steroids, alkylators, and antibodies, recent years have witnessed an explosion of drug approvals for multiple myeloma. The challenge now, said Amrita Krishnan, MD, FACP, is figuring out how to incorporate them all, particularly in the...
The ASCO Answers Palliative Care booklet shows how palliative care is used to manage symptoms and side effects; help with practical concerns; address spiritual questions; and support caregivers, family, and friends. Readers will find: Practical advice on how to access palliative care services...
Registration is now open for the ASCO Research Community Forum 2017 Annual Meeting. Join fellow physician investigators and research staff from across the country for this unique meeting focused on sharing best practices for effectively conducting and managing clinical research and developing...
ASCO has announced that Alexander Chin, MD, MBA, and Joanna C. Yang, MD, have been selected for the 2017–2018 ASCO Health Policy Fellowship program, now entering its 2nd year. The fellowship provides early-career oncologists the skills they need to monitor and shape the regulatory and legislative ...
Social media is a uniquely positioned platform that can spread specific knowledge to a larger audience. Unlike traditional media, it allows anyone to join the conversation, and according to the Pew Research Center, it is here to stay, with 79% of online American adults using Facebook and 24% using...
On April 5, ASCO announced that Instituto de Oncologia do Vale (IOV) was the first practice in Brazil to receive Quality Oncology Practice Initiative (QOPI®) certification through the QOPI Certification Program, LLC (QCP). IOV is the second international practice to achieve this milestone in...
Validation using patient data of an outcome prediction model for the development of dyspnea subsequent to radiotherapy revealed that the prognostic factors in the model did not adequately predict for delta toxicity endpoints, according to results reported by Defraene et al at the 2017 European Lung ...
Kelly Cares Foundation recently became one of the newest supporters of the Conquer Cancer Foundation of ASCO Young Investigator Awards, the flagship program begun in 1984 to support early-career cancer researchers. The mission of Kelly Cares Foundation is to inspire hope by investing resources to...
Melanoma is an immunogenic tumor, as it expresses various melanoma-specific antigens. However, it is both biologically and clinically heterogeneous. Biologically, it expresses different melanoma antigens and has diverse genetic profiles among different patients. Clinically, it varies in the amount ...
The final, 10-year follow-up of the ‘all comers’ tAnGo trial, reported by Earl et al in The Lancet Oncology, continued to show no overall benefit of adding gemcitabine to adjuvant therapy in women with early-stage breast cancer. The trial, initiated in 2001, included patients...
The standard of care for patients with bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG)-unresponsive, high-risk non–muscle invasive bladder cancer is radical cystectomy. Novel therapies that allow patients to preserve their bladder are urgently needed. SWOG (formerly the Southwest Oncology Group), a member of...
Here are several abstracts selected from the proceedings of this year’s American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting & Exposition, highlighting newer therapeutics in various types of high-grade, aggressive non-Hodgkin lymphomas (NHLs), including peripheral T-cell lymphomas, central...
“More and more, we are finding that traditional anatomic TNM staging has significant limitations in predicting prognosis, especially in such cases where response to therapy is an important consideration,” commented session moderator Kelly M. McMasters, MD, PhD, a surgical oncologist at the...
A new score that incorporates tumor biology and response outperforms conventional histopathologic criteria for the staging of breast cancer treated with neoadjuvant chemotherapy, finds a retrospective validation cohort study.1 Investigators led by John R. Bergquist, MD, MS, MA, a general surgery...
Hyperthermic intraperitoneal chemoperfusion is efficacious when used as part of multimodality therapy for low-volume peritoneal metastases of gastric cancer, suggests a prospective single-arm phase II trial.1 Among the 19 patients enrolled, all of whom had stage IV disease with either...
At 5 years, the overall survival rate was 16% in patients with advanced non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) treated with single-agent nivolumab (Opdivo), according to follow-up of a phase Ib dose-ranging study (CA209-003), presented at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual...
Gary K. Schwartz, MD, Chief of Hematology/Oncology and Deputy Director of the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center, New York, is not sold on using the combination of nivolumab (Opdivo) and ipilimumab (Yervoy) for all patients with...
The race is on to identify combinations of immune checkpoint inhibitors that can improve outcomes over the use of immune checkpoint inhibitor monotherapy. Updated results of the phase III CheckMate 067 trial found the combination of nivolumab (Opdivo) and ipilimumab (Yervoy) improved survival in...
A recent study by Mokdad and colleagues, reviewed in this issue of The ASCO Post, looks at cancer demographic data for 28 cancers and compares mortality rates in 1980 to results in 2014.1 Publishing mortality rates by geographic area and the observation of significant differences is not new. The...
White blood cell counts may predict whether patients with lung cancer will benefit from immunotherapy, according to research presented by Tiseo et al at the 2017 European Lung Cancer Conference (ELCC, Abstract 30PD). “Immune checkpoint inhibitors such as nivolumab [Opdivo] and...
Osimertinib (Tagrisso) improved cancer-related symptoms in patients with advanced lung cancer, according to an analysis of patient-reported outcomes from the AURA3 phase III clinical trial presented by Lee et al at the 2017 European Lung Cancer Conference (ELCC, Abstract 85O). “With my...
As reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology by Chen et al, the phase II KEYNOTE-087 trial has shown that the programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1)–inhibitor pembrolizumab (Keytruda) is highly active in patients with relapsed or refractory classical Hodgkin lymphoma. Findings in the study ...
Findings comparing the mutational landscape in pregnant and nonpregnant patients with breast cancer that sought to define whether the disease may have a different biology in pregnant women were reported by Loibl et al at the 2017 IMPAKT Breast Cancer Conference, held in Brussels (Abstract...
Baseline levels of tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) in pretreatment biopsies from patients with HER2-positive breast cancer are significantly associated with pathologic complete response rates following neoadjuvant chemotherapy plus anti-HER2 agents (trastuzumab [Herceptin], lapatinib...
This year, the World Health Organization (WHO) will launch a pilot project for prequalifying biosimilar medicines, a step toward making some of the most expensive treatments for cancer more widely available in low- and middle-income countries. The decision comes after a 2-day meeting in Geneva...
As reported by Katherine S. Virgo, PhD, MBA, of Emory University, and colleagues in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, ASCO has issued a provisional clinical opinion on second-line hormonal therapy for chemotherapy-naive castration-resistant prostate cancer. The provisional clinical opinion applies...
As reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology by Kurian et al, surveys in a population-based sample of patients recently diagnosed with breast cancer indicate that many undergo genetic risk testing without seeing a genetics counselor and that many with BRCA1/2 variants of uncertain significance...
American Medical Association (AMA) President Andrew W. Gurman, MD, released the following statement today after the U.S. House of Representatives passed the American Health Care Act: “The bill passed by the House today will result in millions of Americans losing access to quality,...
Winner of the American Brain Tumor Association Young Investigator Award Anthony C. Wang, MD, a neurosurgeon at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) Mattel Children’s Hospital and the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, presented his research findings on desmoplastic infantile...
Spanish-speaking patients with cancer have new tools to help them understand treatment options for their disease. The American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) has released a series of Spanish-language patient videos on radiation therapy for cancer, including breast, prostate, lung, brain,...
According to a study by Skinner et al, the primary cause of death in patients with head and neck squamous cell carcinoma is local treatment failure. Although human papillomavirus (HPV)-positive head and neck squamous cell carcinoma is sensitive to radiation, HPV-negative tumors are...
According to a study reported by Hamada et al in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, postdiagnosis aspirin use was associated with improved survival vs nonuse among patients with colorectal cancer who have lower, but not higher, tumor levels of CD274 (programmed cell death 1 ligand 1; PD-L1). Study...
In a study reported in JAMA, Ali H. Mokdad, PhD, and colleagues from the University of Washington, Seattle, found that cancer mortality rates in the United States dropped from 240.2 to 192.0 per 100,000 population between 1980 and 2014.1 Mortality rates varied widely among U.S. counties for...
In a separate interview, George Ansstas, MD, a medical neuro-oncologist at Siteman Cancer Center, Washington University, St. Louis, discussed his experience in treating patients with tumor-treating fields. He has treated about 35 patients with glioblastoma in the first-line setting and 20 with...
Using a novel approach called tumor-treating fields—which involves the delivery of low-intensity electric fields to the brain by a patient-operated device—along with standard-of-care temozolomide therapy improved overall survival and progression-free survival vs temozolomide alone in patients with...
This Clinical Trials Resource Guide includes a selection of actively recruiting clinical trials of cyclin-dependent kinase 4/6 (CDK4/6) inhibitors, including palbociclib, ribociclib, and abemaciclib in multiple tumor types. All of the studies here and many others are listed on the National...
The investigational cyclin D–dependent kinase (CDK) 4/6 inhibitor abemaciclib was recently evaluated in several solid tumor types in a phase I multicenter trial.1 Given primarily as a single agent and with continuous dosing, abemaciclib showed encouraging early signals of clinical activity not only ...
Geoffrey I. Shapiro, MD, PhD, Director of the Early Drug Development Center at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, explained the current research initiatives involving cyclin D–dependent kinase (CDK) 4/6 inhibitors. Mechanism of Action How do CDK4/6 inhibitors work at the cellular level in...
The novel mechanism of action of drugs that inhibit the cyclin D–dependent kinases CDK4 and CDK6 has prompted effective new treatment strategies. Although the bulk of the data supporting the use of selective CDK4/6 inhibitors is currently in breast cancer, patients with other tumor types are...
This CE/CME/CEU-accredited supplement is jointly provided by To earn credit/contact hours, you must read all the articles in this supplement and then go to: https://education.annenberg.net/cdk46inhibition Release date: May 10, 2017 Expiration date: May 10, 2018Annenberg Center for Health...
In a study reported in The New England Journal of Medicine, Jamal-Hanjani et al found that early stage non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) tumors were characterized by widespread intratumor genomic heterogeneity and that increased subclonal copy-number alterations in this context were...
In an article in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Sasse et al reported long-term follow-up of German Hodgkin Study Group trials in early-stage favorable and unfavorable Hodgkin lymphoma. The updates cover the HD7 and HD10 trials in favorable disease and the HD8 and HD11 trials in unfavorable...
Men may need more frequent lung cancer screening than women, according to research to be presented by Koo et al at the 2017 European Lung Cancer Conference (ELCC). The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommends annual screening for lung cancer with low-dose computed tomography (CT) in adults...
Researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev have found that babies born to mothers who underwent fertility treatments may be at increased risk of developing types of pediatric malignancies and neoplasms. The study, published by Wainstock et al in the American Journal of Obstetrics &...