Investigators have identified multiple new subtypes of the most common childhood cancer, B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL)—research that has the potential to improve the diagnosis and treatment of high-risk patients. Researchers used integrated genomic analysis, including...
The oncology community is deeply saddened by the untimely passing of Arti Hurria, MD, FASCO, a nationally regarded expert and advocate for elderly patients with cancer. Dr. Hurria died on November 7, 2018, in a traffic accident. At the time of her tragic death, Dr. Hurria was Director of the City...
The ASCO Post’s Integrative Oncology series is intended to facilitate the availability of evidence-based information on integrative and complementary therapies sometimes used by patients with cancer. Eugenie Spiguel, MSN, ANP-BC, and Jyothirmai Gubili, MS, explore the use of valerian for...
On January 14, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved cabozantinib (Cabometyx) tablets for patients with hepatocellular carcinoma who have been previously treated with sorafenib. The FDA’s approval of this oral tyrosine kinase inhibitor was based on the results of the phase III...
On January 14, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved cabozantinib (Cabometyx) tablets for patients with hepatocellular carcinoma who have been previously treated with sorafenib. The FDA’s approval of cabozantinib was based on results from the phase III CELESTIAL trial....
A new report commissioned by the National Organization for Rare Disorders (NORD) and published by the IQVIA Institute demonstrates that the 7-year market exclusivity granted to drugs designated under the Orphan Drug Act of 1983 for rare diseases is working as intended. In nearly every case, orphan...
Thirteen years ago, at age 34, I was healthy and enjoying life. I went to the gym almost daily, and when I wasn’t at the gym, I was shooting hoops with my friends. During a gym workout while on a family vacation, I suddenly felt excruciating pain in my left shoulder and thought I must have strained ...
ASCO is such a misnomer: the American Society of Clinical Oncology is far more than simply “American.” Over the past several years, I (a Canadian-born breast surgical oncologist, with an Indian-born mother and a Tanzanian-born father) have traveled to Zimbabwe, Bhutan, and the Philippines with this ...
HISTORICALLY, CLINICAL research has been viewed as an entity belonging to academic settings alone. With the advent of the Community Clinical Oncology Program (CCOP) in the 1980s and later with the Cancer Trials Support Unit, cancer clinical trials have begun to emerge in the community setting....
The ASCO Post is pleased to reproduce installments of the Art of Oncology as published previously in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. These articles focus on the experience of suffering from cancer or of caring for people diagnosed with cancer, and they include narratives, topical essays,...
Although most major cancer organizations agree on the guidelines for prostate cancer screening, there is still uneven application of the test, such as in the older patient population, resulting in overdiagnosis and waste in an already fiscally challenged health-care system. Researchers from the...
As the number of opioid-related deaths continues to rise in the United States, stakeholders are struggling to make sense of the crisis. At the 2018 Palliative and Supportive Care in Oncology Symposium, two experts in the field, Charles F. von Gunten, MD, PhD, and Leslie J. Blackhall, MD,...
Does evidence of the effectiveness and safety of scalp cooling to reduce hair loss among women being treated for breast cancer mean that scalp cooling is a new standard of care? “I would suggest that it is,” stated Mikel Ross, MSN, RN, AGNP-BC, of the Breast Medicine Service, Memorial Sloan...
Treatment with nivolumab (Opdivo) did not improve response rates or survival over standard chemotherapy in patients with metastatic small cell lung cancer (SCLC) who relapsed following first-line treatment, according to findings presented by Reck et al at the European Society for Medical...
In patients with newly diagnosed multiple myeloma who are not eligible for stem cell transplantation, the addition of daratumumab (Darzalex) to lenalidomide (Revlimid) and dexamethasone significantly reduced the risk of death or disease progression by 44%, according to a late-breaking abstract...
In patients with relapsed or refractory chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), fixed-duration venetoclax -(Venclexta) combined with rituximab (Rituxan) reduced the risk of disease progression or death compared with standard-of-care bendamustine/rituximab, according to longer-term follow-up of the...
Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy is a revolutionary approach to treating hematologic malignancies. As experience with this strategy is gained, researchers are learning more about how to optimize responses, especially in patients with “immune exhaustion,” who have a suboptimal initial...
High drug prices are the number one health-care concern of many Americans. The average price of a cancer drug rose from less than $10,000/yr before 2000 to more than $170,000/yr in 2017.1-3 Between 1995 and 2013, the launch price of cancer drugs increased by 10% to 12% every year, and the average...
First-line immunotherapy with durvalumab (Imfinzi) or the combination of durvalumab and tremelimumab does not improve overall survival in unselected patients with lung cancer, according to late-breaking results from the MYSTIC trial presented by Rizvi et al at the European Society for Medical...
CHECKPOINT INHIBITORS have rapidly become the standard of care as second-line treatment, and in some patients first-line treatment, of advanced bladder cancer. However, the majority of patients do not respond and eventually experience disease progression; these patients will need subsequent...
FORMAL DISCUSSANT Joaquin Mateo, MD, PhD, of the Prostate Cancer Translational Research Group, Vall d’Hebron Institute of Oncology, Barcelona, said that the TRITON2 findings were encouraging, although still preliminary. “We should interpret these results with caution, because this interim analysis ...
THE 2018 Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC) Annual Meeting hosted a meeting of the minds of the world’s premier cancer immunologists. In addition to the cutting-edge laboratory science explored and presented at the meeting, numerous phase I clinical trials and a few phase II studies offered ...
BOOKMARK Title: Cancer Crossings: A Brother, His Doctors, and the Quest for a Cure to Childhood LeukemiaAuthor: Tim WendelPublisher: ILR PressPublication date: April 2018Price: $24.95, hardcover, 256 pages Tim Wendel is a journalist and author of several noted books, mostly concerning sports. In...
Despite the fact that I had to have open heart surgery at age 7 to fix a congenital heart defect and then more surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy to treat a diagnosis of rhabdomyosarcoma a year later, I never felt like I was a sick kid. Children don’t have the existential worries about...
The ASCO Post is pleased to reproduce installments of the Art of Oncology as published previously in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. These articles focus on the experience of suffering from cancer or of caring for people diagnosed with cancer, and they include narratives, topical essays,...
Integrative Oncology is guest edited by Jun J. Mao, MD, MSCE, Laurance S. Rockefeller Chair in Integrative Medicine and Chief, Integrative Medicine Service, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York. GUEST EDITOR The ASCO Post’s Integrative Oncology series is intended to facilitate the...
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the launch of The Chemotherapy Foundation. Founded by Ezra M. Greenspan, MD, in 1968, with the goal of advancing effective cancer treatments, The Chemotherapy Foundation helped propel the modern era of chemotherapy and the later development of targeted...
Cancer is the leading cause of disease-related childhood death. To better serve the special needs of this highly vulnerable patient population, pediatric palliative care teams use a personalized, holistic, and interdisciplinary approach tailored to relieve the physical, psychosocial, and spiritual ...
Researchers, patients with cancer, and philanthropists have come together to launch Count Me In, a nonprofit organization aimed at patient-partnered research. Count Me In allows patients with cancer anywhere in the United States or Canada to easily share their medical information, personal...
Researchers used machine learning to develop a new system to analyze genomic and clinical data to provide a personalized overall outcome that is patient-specific in myelodysplastic syndromes. In tests, the system outperformed the current standard prognostic tool, suggesting the new model may offer...
A new study presented by Woyach et al at the 2018 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting & Exposition (Abstract 6) showed that older patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) have a significantly lower rate of disease progression if treated with ibrutinib rather than...
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently released new findings from the National Youth Tobacco Survey (NYTS) showing that more than 3.6 million middle and high school students were current (past 30 day) e-cigarette users in...
The combination of symptoms I began experiencing in the spring of 2007, including night sweats so severe they woke me from a sound sleep and midline chest wall swelling so extreme I needed a larger shirt size, drove me to seek immediate medical attention. A series of imaging and blood tests...
"WE ABSOLUTELY have an obligation to evaluate all of the features describing our patients with cancer when we are trying to figure out why some patients do better than others,” Lisa A. Newman, MD, MPH, reminded the nearly 700 participants at the 2018 Lynn Sage Breast Cancer Symposium, hosted by...
Formed in 1991, the Rocky Mountain Oncology Society (RMOS), a Chapter Member of the Association of Community Cancer Centers (ACCC) and State Affiliate of ASCO, serves as the voice for Colorado’s multidisciplinary cancer care teams and the patients they serve. Representing the common interests of...
The ASCO Post is pleased to reproduce installments of the Art of Oncology as published previously in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. These articles focus on the experience of suffering from cancer or of caring for people diagnosed with cancer, and they include narratives, topical essays,...
The following essay by Stan Winokur, MD, is adapted, with permission, 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...
“‘Sickness’ is what is happening to the patient. Listen to him. Disease is what is happening to science and to populations.” —Lawrence Weed, MD, 1978 America’s massive health-care system is highly complex, with its own unique language, methods, technologies, and scientific approaches, developed and ...
THE INTRODUCTION of the electronic health record (EHR) was supposed to lead us to a utopian world for health-care delivery in America. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, signed into law on March 23, 2010, promoted its implementation by providing financial incentives.1 The Centers for...
In this installment of the Living a Full Life series, guest editor Jame Abraham, MD, interviewed Clifford A. Hudis, MD, FACP, FASCO, ASCO’s Chief Executive Officer. Prior to his current position, Dr. Hudis served in a variety of roles at ASCO, including President during ASCO’s 50th anniversary...
In response to the opioid-overdose epidemic, several measures have been put in place, such as the reclassification of hydrocodone as a Schedule II opioid and new requirements for physician review of prescription drug–monitoring program databases in most states. Moreover, the Surgeon General and...
Three prominent medical organizations have issued a new clinical guideline for physicians treating men with early-stage prostate cancer using external-beam radiation therapy (EBRT). Developed by a panel of experts from the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO), ASCO, and the American...
Invited discussant Jean-Pascal Machiels, MD, PhD, Head of the Department of Medical Oncology at the Cliniques universitaires Saint-Luc, UCLouvain, Brussels, called the study “very important,” especially for showing that in patients with high expression of programmed cell death ligand 1 (PD-L1),...
For patients with prostate cancer who have persistent or rising prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels after radical prostatectomy, the addition of short-term androgen-deprivation therapy and radiotherapy to the pelvic lymph nodes demonstrated increased rates of freedom from disease progression,...
In 2010, the long-awaited findings from the National Lung Screening Trial (NLST) revealed that participants who received low-dose helical computed tomography (CT) scans had a 15% to 20% lower risk of dying of lung cancer than participants who received standard chest x-rays. In response, the U.S....
Elderly patients with limited-stage small cell lung cancer (SCLC) showed similar survival and toxicity compared to younger patients when treated with concurrent chemoradiotherapy. These study findings were published by Christodoulou et al in the Journal of Thoracic Oncology. SCLC constitutes ...
Three leading oncology practices have united with partners in technology and finance to launch OneOncology, a physician-driven company that aims to unite more than 225 community oncology providers from 60-plus locations. Altogether, OneOncology will treat nearly 158,000 cancer patients a year. The...
THE INTERNATIONAL Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC) 19th World Conference on Lung Cancer was the largest in its history. One of the key themes of the meeting was to focus on the patient. Here are highlights of presentations from this conference that demonstrate the role of the...
MEN WITH newly diagnosed metastatic prostate cancer do not typically receive treatment to the primary tumor with radiation or surgery. A new analysis of the STAMPEDE trial found that radiation administered to the prostate can improve overall survival in men with newly diagnosed metastatic prostate...
“A KEY AIM of treatment is the need to focus on preventing recurrence, which happens in 70% of patients. Over the past 20 years, we have made few inroads in preventing recurrence. This study brings a poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP) inhibitor olaparib (Lynparza) to the first-line setting,...