Only recently described, breast implant–associated anaplastic large cell lymphoma usually presents as an effusion-associated fibrous capsule surrounding the implant and less frequently as a mass. Little is known about the natural history and long-term outcomes of such disease. In a study reported...
The Bruton’s tyrosine kinase inhibitor ibrutinib (Imbruvica) is changing the landscape of treatment in chronic lymphocytic leukemia. New research with the drug in lymphoma, presented at the 2013 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting in New Orleans, indicates it may be of benefit in...
Andrew D. Zelenetz, MD, PhD, Chair of the Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma Guideline Panel of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) and former Chief of the Lymphoma Service at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, put the latest maintenance trials into perspective for The ASCO Post....
PI3K-mediated activation of downstream effectors allows tumors to escape from negative growth control, and this action may be checked with PI3K inhibitors. At the 2013 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting, researchers reported results in patients with relapsed or refractory lymphoma...
Elevated circulating tumor cells were prognostic for survival but did not pan out as a marker for switching after one cycle of chemotherapy in patients with metastatic breast cancer. The phase III Southwest Oncology Group (SWOG) S0500 clinical trial, presented at the 2013 San Antonio Breast Cancer...
Ramucirumab added to first-line docetaxel failed to improve progression-free survival in patients with metastatic breast cancer in the large, randomized, placebo-controlled ROSE/TRIO-12 trial.1 An interim analysis of overall survival showed no advantage for the addition of ramucirumab. This study,...
For postmastectomy neuropathic pain, perineural infiltration with a combination of bupivacaine and dexamethasone is a “simple, effective, practice-changing treatment that any surgeon can do,” according to Laura J. Esserman, MD, MBA, Professor of Surgery and Radiology at the University of...
The San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium brings together specialists from all over the world who focus on management of breast cancer. We have covered many of the important presentations in the pages of The ASCO Post and in our online Evening News. Below are summaries of additional noteworthy...
The Advanced Practitioner Society for Hematology and Oncology (APSHO) announced its launch as a new organization focused on meeting the unique educational and professional needs of the advanced practitioner in hematology and oncology. The formation of the Society was made public on January 26,...
Neal J. Meropol, MD, Chief of Hematology and Oncology at University Hospitals Seidman Cancer Center and Case Western Reserve University, discussed the CAIRO3 results at the Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium. He said there are three main lessons from CAIRO3: (1) It is feasible yet challenging to...
Dr. Von Roenn’s history with ASCO spans nearly 3 decades. She has served on ASCO’s Board of Directors, the ASCO Palliative Care Task Force, the Scientific Program, Cancer Education, and Cancer Communications Committees, among others. In 2011, Dr. Von Roenn received the ASCO-ACS Award at the Annual...
Last September, Jamie H. Von Roenn, MD, left her position as Professor of Medicine at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago to join ASCO as its Senior Director of Education, Science and Professional Development. In her new position, Dr. Von Roenn will provide strategic...
The connection between smoking and lung cancer is universally accepted as scientific fact, and those who choose to smoke are painfully aware of the risk it poses for addiction and subsequent cancer. However, to fully appreciate the significance of the Surgeon General’s report, one must turn back to ...
The tobacco industry has always been a major player in congressional races, especially in Southern tobacco-growing states. Moreover, the industry is notoriously bipartisan in their political donations, and members of both parties have returned the favor by voting for tobacco interests. “The 2014...
On January 11, 2014, the nation commemorated the 50th anniversary of a document that transformed our public health landscape and has saved millions of lives: Smoking and Health: Report of the Advisory Committee to the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service. This groundbreaking report, which...
Rebecca Miksad, MD, MPH, Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Attending Physician, Gastrointestinal Medical Oncology, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, discussed the findings at the symposium and the potential for immunotherapy in pancreatic cancer....
For patients with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) who are unable to receive anthracycline-containing chemoimmunotherapy because of cardiac comorbidity, a regimen of rituximab (Rituxan), gemcitabine, cyclophosphamide, vincristine, and prednisolone (R-GCVP) “is an active, reasonably...
City of Hope in Duarte, California, has named Steven T. Rosen, MD, as its first Provost and Chief Scientific Officer. Dr. Rosen will guide the scientific direction of the center’s medical research, treatment, and education. He will also assume directorship of the comprehensive cancer institute,...
David A. Fullerton, MD, of the University of Colorado School of Medicine, was elected President of The Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS) at the Society’s 50th Annual Meeting in Orlando, Florida. “STS has been a preeminent medical society for many years,” said Dr. Fullerton. “It is truly a great...
The Advanced Practitioner Society for Hematology and Oncology (APSHO) is issuing a call for members to oncology nurse practitioners, physician assistants, clinical nurse specialists, advanced degree nurses, and pharmacists. The Society was launched recently during JADPRO Live, a meeting of the...
As a medical oncologist and palliative care physician, I’ve had the privilege of caring for cancer patients and delivering primary palliative care and symptom control, as well as the chance to care for patients especially referred for complex pain and symptom problems (in secondary and even...
Currently, one of the most challenging problems in oncology is to accurately predict whether neoplastic lesions detected by screening tests will progress. The focus on developing ever-more sensitive cancer screening tests has produced the clinical dilemma of overdiagnosis. Overdiagnosis occurs when ...
If a randomized, controlled trial of therapy for breast cancer was submitted for publication in which 1. The drug being tested was old and ineffective, and 2. prior to randomization, the women underwent a clinical breast examination and the study coordinators knew who had the largest cancers, and...
The recent report from the Canadian National Breast Screening Study (CNBSS)—published in BMJ and reviewed in The ASCO Post, early release online—concluded that annual mammography in women aged 40 to 59 does not result in a reduction in mortality from breast cancer beyond that of physical...
Nearly 250 advanced practitioners assembled at the first annual JADPRO Live educational symposium in St. Petersburg, Florida, hosted by the Journal of the Advanced Practitioner in Oncology (JADPRO). Leaders from four prominent oncology organizations championed collaborative practice as not only...
Commenting on the CLL 11 trial in chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), Jennifer R. Brown, MD, PhD, Director of the CLL Center at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, said she agreed with first author Valentin Goede, MD, that in this study, replacing rituximab (Rituxan) with obinutuzumab (Gazyva) in ...
Two novel agents have shown promising activity in chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), including poor-risk patients: the Bcl-2 inhibitor ABT-199 and the small-molecule PI3K inhibitor IPI-145. Both drugs achieved excellent response rates in heavily pretreated relapsed/refractory patients including...
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has expanded the approved use of ibrutinib (Imbruvica) for the treatment of patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) who have received at least one previous therapy. Ibrutinib, an oral Bruton’s tyrosine kinase inhibitor, was previously granted...
HLA-haploidentical hematopoietic stem cell transplantation can be performed safely, yield good outcomes, and greatly expand the number of patients with hematologic malignancies who can be treated with stem cell transplant, studies presented at the 2013 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual...
At the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, press briefing moderator C. Kent Osborne, MD, Director of the Dan Duncan Cancer Center at Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, predicted the findings of the study by Badwe et al could be practice-changing. “This is not to say that we shouldn’t perform...
In an effort to continue to bring patients and those who care about and for them the most timely, comprehensive cancer information, ASCO’s patient education website, Cancer.Net, has added a new interactive resource—the Cancer.Net Blog (www.cancer.net/blog). “We decided that a blog made sense for...
Michael A. Thompson, MD, PhD, a Medical Oncologist for Aurora Cancer Care and the Medical Director of Early Cancer Research at Aurora Health Care in Wisconsin, has become something of an expert on the Conquer Cancer Foundation. It began in 2006, when he received a Conquer Cancer Foundation of ASCO...
Commenting on the results of the HOPE Study presented at the 2013 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, Carlos L. Arteaga, MD, said, “We all know that this is the right thing to do. This important study provides us with new guidelines and a structure so that patients find it easier to follow the...
Amid studies of novel targeted therapies, genetic analyses of tumors, and new ways to approach the treatment of breast cancer, a low-tech study presented at the 2013 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium found that a yearlong exercise program reduced joint pain associated with aromatase inhibitors in ...
An innovative approach to streamlining the testing of novel agents in breast cancer has yielded some of its first results, which were reported at the 2013 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.1 Adaptive Trial Design The veliparib/carboplatin plus standard neoadjuvant therapy regimen is currently...
Debu Tripathy, MD, Professor of Medicine, Co-Leader of the Women’s Cancer Program, and the Priscilla and Art Ulene Chair in Women’s Cancer at the University of Southern California Norris Cancer Center, Los Angeles, commented on the APT study for The ASCO Post. “In treating early-stage HER2-positive ...
There may be a benefit for treating small HER2-positive tumors—a breast cancer subset for whom treatment recommendations have not been established but for whom there is still risk of recurrence—and this can be done with little toxicity, according to a multicenter study presented at the 2013 San...
CVS Caremark recently announced that it will stop selling cigarettes and other tobacco products at its more than 7,600 CVS/pharmacy stores across the United States by October 1, 2014, making CVS/pharmacy the first national pharmacy chain to take this step in support of the health and well-being of...
More than 650 studies were presented at the 2014 Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium, which attracted a multidisciplinary group of more than 3,500 medical, surgical, and radiation oncologists and gastroenterologists. The following briefs highlight a handful of noteworthy studies from the meeting....
As neoadjuvant therapy for rectal cancer, infusional fluorouracil (5-FU) and oral capecitabine achieve similar outcomes, and the addition of oxaliplatin confers no additional benefit, according to the mature results of the National Surgical Adjuvant Breast and Bowel Project (NSABP) R-04 trial,...
Melanie B. Thomas, MD, Associate Director of Clinical Investigations and the Grace E. DeWolff Chair of Medical Oncology at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, commented on the findings by Martin et al for The ASCO Post. “I think this study is exciting,” she said. “They were...
“We have a lot of options for first-line therapy [in renal cell carcinoma] these days. The question is, what do we do with first-line failures?” said Daniel J. Canter, MD, formal discussant of the SWITCH trial at the Genitourinary Cancers Symposium. Dr. Canter is Vice Chairman of the Urologic...
The explosion of new therapies for metastatic renal cell carcinoma is a welcome advance, but studies have not yet defined optimal sequencing of the newer therapies. According to the phase III SWITCH trial, it matters little whether therapy for metastatic renal cell carcinoma begins with sorafenib...
“Cytoreductive nephrectomy is routinely used in metastatic renal cell carcinoma, but its use is not as firmly established in the targeted therapy era. And its use is not without risk,” said formal discussant of the International Metastatatic Renal Cell Carcinoma Database Consortium (IMDC) trial,...
The U.S. Congress recently did something rarely seen on Capitol Hill: Leaders from both sides of the aisle agreed on a piece of legislation. On February 6, 2014, the House Energy and Commerce and Ways and Means Committees and the Senate Finance Committee announced its agreement on a bill—the SGR...
In January, Congress approved a $1 trillion appropriations bill for the rest of fiscal year 2014. While the new bill includes $29.9 billion for the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—$1 billion above FY2013 levels after sequestration—including $4.9 billion for the National Cancer Institute (NCI),...
Charles Ryan, MD, moderator of the press conference at the Genitourinary Cancers Symposium where the PREVAIL trial data were discussed, emphasized that this study breaks new ground for enzalutamide (Xtandi) in chemotherapy-naive patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer. “The...
Encouraging results of the large phase III PREVAIL trial represent another positive milestone for men with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer. Enzalutamide (Xtandi) improved overall survival by 29% and reduced the risk of radiographic progression of disease by 81% in men who had not...
In the near future, community oncologists will be tasked with helping patients interpret the results of next-generation sequencing of their tumors. Specifically, we will help patients choose an academic center with a phase I targeted therapy program that is a plausible fit for their disease....
I read with interest the note from Jeff Boyd, PhD, Senior Vice-President for Molecular Medicine at Fox Chase Cancer Center, calling into question my recent commentary about the high costs of partly validated testing in the domain of molecular medicine. One of the oldest tricks in the book is to...