ASCO is working—through research, education, and promotion of the highest quality patient care—toward a world where cancer is prevented or cured, and every survivor is healthy. With the goal of ensuring that all patients receive the high-quality care they expect and deserve, ASCO is committed to...
ASCO’s Clinical Practice Committee (CPC) and State Affiliate Council (SAC) have a history of supporting the Conquer Cancer Foundation of ASCO (CCF) Young Investigator Award (YIA) program. Individual members of the Clinical Practice Committee and State Affiliate Council, as well as ASCO State...
Stock your practice with ASCO resources for your patients during March, Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month. Visit ASCO’s patient information website, Cancer.Net, for a comprehensive guide to colorectal cancer as well as a shorter, one-page colorectal cancer fact sheet. You will also find specialized ...
CancerLinQ LLC, a wholly owned nonprofit subsidiary of ASCO, has announced that the University of Virginia Cancer Center has signed an agreement to participate in the CancerLinQ ® platform. “As CancerLinQ ® continues to rapidly grow, we are thrilled to have the University of Virginia Cancer Center ...
Diffuse infiltrating low-grade gliomas include oligodendrogliomas and astrocytomas and account for about 5% of all primary brain tumors. Treatment strategies for these low-grade gliomas in adults have recently changed, as detailed in a recent review in the Journal of Oncology Practice.1 The...
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (RSAS) has decided to award the inaugural Sjöberg Prize 2017 to James P. Allison, PhD, Professor and Vivian L. Smith Distinguished Chair in Immunology at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, and Tony Hunter, PhD, American Cancer Society...
It’s no secret that cancer drug costs have skyrocketed out of control, with some treatments costing as much as $100,000 to $200,000 per year and even upward. This has put tremendous strain on the U.S. health-care system, while causing financial toxicity and bankruptcy for many patients. Peter B....
Cornelius J.M. Melief, MD, PhD, Emeritus Professor at Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands and Chief Scientific Officer at ISA Pharmaceuticals, noted that toll-like receptors (TLRs) are useful in promoting immune activation in a variety of leukocytes and that the signaling pathways...
In the phase II Active8 trial, a novel immunotherapy agent, motolimod, failed to improve outcomes over chemotherapy plus cetuximab (Erbitux) in patients with recurrent or metastatic squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck. In a post hoc analysis, however, patients with injection-site...
Cancer immunotherapy is about to get much more complicated. Just as oncologists are becoming familiar with checkpoint inhibitors and their growing indications, they will eventually be challenged with using them in novel combinations and in new tumor types. This will be the fruit that comes from...
Richard ‘Rick’ Boulay, MDChief of Gynecologic Oncology Institution: Lehigh Valley Health Network Member since: 2016 Three years ago, Richard ‘Rick’ Boulay, MD, Chief of Gynecologic Oncology at Lehigh Valley Health Network, walked onto the stage at TEDx Lehigh River and confronted his audience...
Chronic viral hepatitis is a major causative factor for hepatocellular carcinoma, but antiviral therapy might reduce the incidence of hepatocellular carcinoma by preventing or eliminating chronic hepatitis infections, according to Adrian M. Di Bisceglie, MD, Professor of Internal Medicine at Saint ...
Phase I Study Title: A Pilot Study of SGI-110 in Combination With an Allogeneic Colon Cancer Cell Vaccine and Cyclophosphamide in Metastatic Colorectal Cancer as Maintenance Therapy Study Type: Phase I/interventional/parallel assignment Study Sponsor and Collaborators: Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive...
A widely reported study found that cervical cancer mortality was higher and the racial disparity between black and white women greater than previously reported.1 The study omitted from the mortality estimates those women who had undergone hysterectomies, usually involving removal of the cervix....
Cervical cancer mortality rates were significantly higher, particularly among black women, when national data were corrected to exclude women who have had hysterectomies. For black women, the cervical cancer mortality rate rose from 5.7 to 10.1 per 100,000 when corrected for hysterectomy, an...
“This is a big deal. This is going to change all of oncology, not just head and neck cancer,”1 Tanguy Seiwert, MD, remarked following a summary by Jeffrey Sosman, MD, on advances in immunotherapy for treating cancer.2 Dr. Sosman, Director of the Melanoma Program and Clinical Director of Cancer...
Immunotherapy has been a major advance in lung cancer, but it is not without its challenges, according to Sanjay Popat, PhD, FRCP, a consultant medical oncologist and reader in cancer medicine at the Royal Marsden Hospital, London, UK. He reviewed some of the challenges pertaining to the use of...
As reported by Elizabeth R. Plimack, MD, of Fox Chase Cancer Center, Temple Health, and colleagues in The Lancet Oncology, pembrolizumab (Keytruda) has shown activity in patients in the locally advanced or metastatic urothelial carcinoma cohort included in the phase Ib KEYNOTE-012 trial. In the...
In a phase II trial (Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group–American College of Radiology Imaging Network Cancer Research Group E3205) reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Garg et al found that the addition of cetuximab (Erbitux) to definitive chemoradiotherapy appeared to reduce the rates of...
In a study reported in JAMA Oncology, Pearlman et al found that 16% of patients with early-onset colorectal cancer had germline cancer susceptibility mutations, with a wide array of such mutations being identified. Heather Hampel, MS, CGC, of The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center,...
In a biomarker analysis of the CATCH trial reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Alok A. Khorana, MD, of the Cleveland Clinic, and colleagues found that elevated circulating tissue factor levels were associated with an increased risk of recurrent venous thromboembolism in cancer patients on ...
“With the negative results of this phase III trial and the discontinuation of ganetespib development, is this the end for this once promising drug class in non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), or is there still an opportunity for heat shock protein (Hsp) inhibitors to make a meaningful impact?”...
The news that I had breast cancer came at an especially difficult time in my life and was quite shocking to hear. My father had died of lung cancer just 1 month before my diagnosis, and I was still grieving his death when I suddenly had to confront my own mortality. In retrospect, the diagnosis...
If you Google the search term “breast cancer,” about 155,000,000 results will pop up in .83 seconds. Add to that pamphlets, journal articles, and library shelves bending under the weight of books written about breast cancer. That’s a mind-bending amount of information to parse through for the...
ASCO and the National Comprehensive Cancer Network® (NCCN®) have announced a joint collaboration to publish practical clinical guidance on the management of side effects caused by immunotherapy. This novel collaboration aims to rapidly support improved quality of care for the growing number of...
The new Cleveland Clinic Taussig Cancer Center began welcoming patients on March 6, 2017. The 377,000 square-foot facility houses all outpatient cancer treatment services in one location, with the center’s team of medical and radiation oncologists, surgeons, nurses, genetic counselors, social...
On February 1, 2017, the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC) issued the following statement: According to its own public reports, in 2016 Phillip Morris manufactured 800 billion cigarettes. Thus, [IASLC] views with some skepticism Philip Morris’ recent statement...
For patients with multiple myeloma, chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy is gaining ground in pilot studies. At the 2016 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting & Exposition, researchers presented their latest findings for this innovative therapy, which has proven...
The Fox Chase–Temple University Hospital Bone Marrow Transplant Program has received internationally recognized accreditation by the Foundation for the Accreditation of Cellular Therapy (FACT) at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. By demonstrating compliance with the FACT-JACIE...
To summarize the lessons learned from the development of epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR)-targeted therapy, one only has to go back about 10 years, according to Frances A. Shepherd, MD, Scott Taylor Chair in Lung Cancer Research at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre and Professor of Medicine at ...
In a rigorous study of tumor tissue collected from 125 patients with aggressive brain cancers, researchers at Johns Hopkins said they have found no evidence of cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection and concluded that a link between the two diseases, as claimed by earlier reports, likely does not exist. A ...
In a retrospective multicenter cohort study reported in JAMA, Turcotte et al found that the risk for subsequent neoplasms in 5-year survivors of childhood cancers decreased between those diagnosed in the 1970s vs the 1990s but nevertheless remained elevated vs expected incidence. The reduced risk...
Combining immunotherapies with each other or with other agents such as chemotherapy and growth factor inhibitors holds promise for better tapping their benefit in patients with lung cancer, data from several studies suggest. Results show that strategic combinations can achieve higher response...
Although “treatment advances” and “precision medicine” are today’s buzz words in oncology, they don’t apply equally to all malignancies. For instance, median overall survival for newly diagnosed patients with metastatic pancreatic cancer has not improved much over the past 20 years, according to...
A novel approach using intravesical gene therapy showed promising activity in a phase II trial that enrolled patients with bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG)-refractory or -relapsed nonmuscle invasive bladder cancer.1 The rate of high-grade relapse-free survival at 12 months was 35% in patients treated ...
Human papillomavirus (HPV) is the most common sexually transmitted infection worldwide. It affects 80% of individuals, with the initial infection usually occurring between the ages of 15 and 24. Persistent infection with oncogenic HPV genotypes, primarily 16 and 18, is the cause of virtually all...
In 1995, Matthew Zachary, an aspiring concert pianist and composer, was en route to graduate school to study film composition when he lost all fine-motor coordination in his left hand, was diagnosed with pediatric brain cancer (medulloblastoma), told he would never play again, and was given 6...
In a study reported at the 2017 Quality Care Symposium by Zheng et al (Abstract 3) and published in the Journal of Oncology Practice by Jackman et al, researchers explored the use of clinical pathways to support clinical decision-making and manage resources for patients with late-stage...
In a single-institution study reported in the Journal of Oncology Practice, de Souza et al found that two-thirds of patients with locally advanced head and neck cancer had to use a financial coping strategy to help pay for care within the first 6 months of treatment. Study Details The study...
In a phase I study reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Aggarwal et al found evidence that the histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitor abexinostat may act to reverse resistance to the vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) inhibitor pazopanib (Votrient) via epigenetic modulation of VEGF in ...
In a phase II trial reported in The Lancet Oncology, Morris et al found that nivolumab (Opdivo) was active in previously treated unresectable metastatic squamous cell carcinoma of the anal canal. This malignancy is associated with human papillomavirus (HPV) infection, with the rationale for...
Exercise and/or psychological therapy may work better than medications to reduce cancer-related fatigue and should be recommended first to patients, according to a Wilmot Cancer Institute-led study published by Mustian et al in JAMA Oncology. “If a [patient with cancer] is having trouble...
In a prospective cohort study reported in JAMA, Rugo et al found that use of a scalp-cooling device reduced hair loss in women receiving nonanthracycline chemotherapy for early-stage breast cancer. Study Details In the study, 101 evaluable patients from 5 U.S. centers with stage I or II breast...
In a single-institution experience reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Gershenson et al at MD Anderson Cancer Center found that hormonal maintenance therapy was associated with improved progression-free survival among women with stage II to IV low-grade serous carcinoma of the ovary or...
As reported in The Lancet Oncology by Borchmann et al, a phase III German Hodgkin Study Group trial in advanced Hodgkin lymphoma showed no progression-free survival benefit of adding rituximab (Rituxan) in patients with positive positron-emission tomography (PET) findings after two courses (PET-2)...
Results from a new prospective clinical trial indicate that high–dose rate (HDR) brachytherapy administered in a single 19-Gy treatment may be a safe and effective alternative to longer courses of HDR treatment for men with localized prostate cancer. The study was reported by Krauss et al in...
Adding two blood-borne proteins associated with cancer cell migration increases the predictive ability of the current biomarker for pancreatic cancer to detect early-stage disease, a research team from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center reported in a study by Balasenthil et al in the ...
In the 11-year follow-up of the HERA trial reported in The Lancet, Cameron et al found that 1 year of trastuzumab (Herceptin) following adjuvant therapy for HER2-positive breast cancer remained associated with improved disease-free and overall survival compared with observation. No additional...
In a phase III KEYNOTE-045 trial reported in The New England Journal of Medicine, Bellmunt et al found that pembrolizumab (Keytruda) significantly improved overall survival vs investigator choice of chemotherapy as second-line treatment in patients with advanced urothelial cancer whose disease...
A new analysis of data from the U.S. Military Health System found that mood and adjustment disorders such as anxiety and depression were strong predictors of the annual number of outpatient visits, hospital admissions, and number of days in the hospital for patients with breast and prostate...