Psychological therapy may reduce adverse biobehavioral effects of testicular cancer in young adult survivors, according to a pilot study published by Hoyt et al in the American Journal of Men’s Health. Biobehavior is the interaction of biologic processes and behavior. The recently published...
A study that tracked parental opinion about the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine showed that after hesitancy decreased for several years, hesitancy has now either stabilized or increased in some ethnic and age groups, according to results presented by Adjei Boakye et al at the 14th AACR...
2021 marks the 20th year of collaboration between ASCO; Conquer Cancer®, the ASCO Foundation; and the Breast Cancer Research Foundation® (BCRF). BCRF’s pivotal support during the past 2 decades has been critical to both organizations’ shared achievements in funding breakthroughs in breast cancer...
Charles M. Rudin, MD, PhD, Hassenfeld Professor and Chief of the Thoracic Oncology Service, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, commented that although ATLANTIS1 “unfortunately joins the ranks of negative phase III studies in patients with recurrent small cell lung cancer,” there are “some...
For years, scientists at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center and the University of Chicago Medicine Comprehensive Cancer Center have devoted themselves to research to better understand ovarian cancer. Now, teams of researchers from these two leading centers are combining efforts after together ...
Monica Arnedos, MD, PhD, Head of the Breast Cancer Research Program at the Institut Bergonié, Bordeaux, France, commented on the study findings on extended treatment with letrozole. “We cannot ignore the results of the GIM4 trial.1 It provides additional strong evidence to support extended...
For patients with early-stage hormone receptor–positive breast cancer, extending the duration of letrozole after tamoxifen—for up to 8 years of total endocrine therapy—significantly improved invasive disease–free survival over the standard 5 or so years, according to the final analysis of the...
Shanu Modi, MD, of the Breast Medicine Service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, called the DESTINY-Breast03 results,1 which showed a highly significant benefit for fam-trastuzumab deruxtecan-nxki (T-DXd) over trastuzumab emtansine (T-DM1), “unprecedented.” She suggested they...
The antibody-drug conjugate fam-trastuzumab deruxtecan-nxki (T-DXd) may become a new option as a second-line treatment of patients with HER2-positive unresectable or metastatic breast cancer, based on results from the global phase III DESTINY-Breast03 trial. These findings were presented by Javier...
“It is important to note that a paper on managing individuals with germline variants in PALB2 was published in the same issue of Genetics in Medicine as an article on reporting secondary findings in clinical exome and genome sequencing,”1,2 Douglas R. Stewart, MD, told The ASCO Post. “PALB2 is a...
PALB2 germline pathogenic variants are associated with a substantially increased risk for breast cancer and a smaller increased risk for pancreatic and ovarian cancers, warranting enhanced surveillance and the option of risk-reducing interventions, according to a global team of cancer genetic...
Since my small cell lung cancer diagnosis in 2010, I’ve had to overcome not just the distress of having a life-threatening disease, but the stigma attached to it as well. I admit that I was a smoker. I was attracted to smoking when I was 16 and saw how “cool” people looked smoking in television and ...
“I vividly remember watching television with my older sister, Suzy, and marveling at President Nixon’s signing of the National Cancer Act in December 1971, and thinking ‘for me, this was like a man going to the moon,’” writes Nancy G. Brinker in the foreword to the recently published Centers of the ...
Ensuring equitable cancer care for every patient, everywhere has been embedded into ASCO’s mission statement since the Society’s inception nearly 60 years ago. Nevertheless, events of the past year, including the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which has disproportionally impacted minority communities, ...
For aggressive B-cell lymphomas, chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy saves lives, but relapse remains common, and a second-line standard of care is lacking. During the 2021 Pan Pacific Lymphoma Conference, Grzegorz (Greg) S. Nowakowski, MD, Professor of Medicine and Oncology, Lymphoma...
Gastrointestinal oncologist Emily K. Bergsland, MD, was born and spent her formative years in La Crosse, Wisconsin, situated on the banks of the Mississippi River. “No one in my family was in the medical field; however, both my parents valued higher education. In fact, when I was in high school, my ...
Eleven years ago this month, the scans and exams that hold the most power to spot the early signs of cancer became available for free to many American adults through the passing of the Affordable Care Act. Now, two new studies show that when those screening tests reveal potentially troubling signs, ...
For more than 2 decades, the chemotherapy agent gemcitabine has been a mainstay treatment for several types of cancer. Now, scientists have uncovered genetic evidence of which patients with high-grade serous ovarian cancer are likely to benefit from the drug. In a study published by Panagiotis...
Researchers have shown that using a validated risk calculator helped to drive informed treatment decisions in older patients with cancer. Mbewe et al identified the Cancer and Aging Research Group (CARG) calculator as a quick and helpful tool in assessing chemotherapy toxicity probability in...
Researchers have discovered that grouping EGFR mutations by structure and function provides an accurate framework to match patients with non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) to the right drugs. The findings, published by Robichaux et al in Nature, identify four subgroups of mutations and introduce a...
Breast cancer survivors who participated in Active Living After Cancer, an evidence-based 12-week group program, markedly increased their physical activity and ability to accomplish the basic pursuits of daily life, reported Tami-Maury et al in the journal Cancer. The results show the program could ...
Fox Chase Cancer Center and the Marvin and Concetta Greenberg Pancreatic Cancer Institute were recently renewed as a Clinical Center of Excellence and named for the first time as an Academic Center of Excellence for Pancreatic Cancer by the National Pancreas Foundation. This distinction places Fox...
In this installment of The ASCO Post’s Global Oncology series, Guest Editor Chandrakanth Are, MBBS, MBA, FRCS, FACS, spoke with Gregorio Jaimovich, MD, Director of the Bone Marrow Transplant Program at Favaloro University Hospital in Buenos Aires. Distinguished expert on radiation therapy and bone...
Katherine Van Loon, MD, MPH, was raised in Miami, until the age of 12, and then her family relocated to Atlanta, where she spent her junior and high school years. “If you ask my parents about my decision to become a doctor, they will say I first declared it at age 5. Nobody knew how that idea came...
An ASCO guideline rapid update is revising recommendations for the management of locally advanced esophageal carcinoma to include provision of nivolumab following adjuvant chemoradiotherapy and surgery. The new guidance addresses treatment of patients with residual disease following resection and...
A recently updated ASCO guideline offers both new and revised guidance on the treatment of hormone receptor–positive, HER2-negative metastatic breast cancer.1 “ASCO regularly updates its guidelines to make sure everything is current and valuable for oncologists and patients. About a year ago,...
During the opening session of the 2021 ASCO Annual Meeting, Julio Frenk, MD, PhD, MPH, President of the University of Miami, gave a riveting presentation in which he described the devastating effects of the global COVID-19 pandemic on patients with cancer as well as on fragile and fragmented...
The OPTIMUM/MUKnine1 and FORTE2 updates were discussed at the 2021 ASCO Annual Meeting by Gordon Cook, MBChB, PhD, Clinical Director of the National Institute for Health Research In Vitro Diagnostics Cooperative and the Clinical Trials Unit in Hematology of the University of Leeds, United Kingdom....
A novel combination of well-known drugs may prolong survival in patients with prostate cancer, according to late-breaking research presented at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress 2021. The PEACE-1 and STAMPEDE studies found that the addition of abiraterone acetate plus...
Oncologists who treat patients with melanoma will need to become familiar with another immunotherapy approach. For refractory metastatic disease, adoptive cell therapy is on the horizon. “Adoptive cell therapy will offer additional hope for our patients with melanoma. We’ll likely be seeing this...
There is no doubt that subsets of patients with esophageal and gastric cancers benefit from immune checkpoint inhibitor therapy. The complexity lies in identifying the appropriate histology, tumor location, expression of programmed cell death receptors and ligands, mechanism of checkpoint...
As ASCO Annual Meeting attendees know by now, clinicians don’t have to be at McCormick Place to hear practice-changing findings and forward-looking advances in the field of oncology. Interesting content was no exception at the 2021 conference, so in addition to covering the biggest news from the...
Antibody-drug conjugates are improving outcomes of patients with lymphoma, often those who have exhausted treatment options after chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy. Four available antibody-drug conjugates are in the clinic, with brentuximab vedotin moving into the front-line...
In relapsed or refractory B-cell lymphomas, bispecific T-cell engager antibodies are finding a place in the treatment algorithm, said Christopher Flowers, MD, MS, FASCO, Professor and Chair of the Department of Lymphoma/Myeloma at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston. At the...
By the time my non–small cell lung cancer was diagnosed in 2004, it had already reached stage IIIB, and I was told there was little that could be done for me. I was 56, a wife, the mother of 3 children, and at the peak of my career as president of Olympian Oil. Although my aunt, brother, and...
Although the National Cancer Institute (NCI) has identified adolescents and young adults (AYAs) with cancer as a distinct patient population from children and older adults with the disease, research into the diagnosis, treatment, and survivorship specific to this patient population has not kept...
The phase II ANCHOR CRC study, the largest prospective study of BRAF inhibitor–based therapy as first-line treatment of metastatic colorectal cancer, has met its primary endpoint, with 47.8% of patients with metastatic colorectal cancer responding to first-line treatment with encorafenib,...
Dozens of oral chemotherapy drugs have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration over the past 2 decades and are now being prescribed in the treatment of many cancer types. However, most oral anticancer drug prescriptions require coordination between payers and providers, which can...
Fam-trastuzumab deruxtecan-nxki (T-DXd) showed statistically significant improvement in progression-free survival vs trastuzumab emtansine (T-DM1) in second-line treatment for HER2-positive unresectable or metastatic breast cancer, according to results from the global phase III DESTINY-Breast03...
Sentinel lymph node biopsy “had similar diagnostic accuracy and prognostic ability as lymphadenectomy in patients with high-grade endometrial cancer at greatest risk for nodal metastases,” according to the SENTOR trial, a prospective cohort study of 156 patients with clinical stage I disease. Using ...
Disease regression was observed in 82% of women with endometrial hyperplasia with atypia and 43% of women with endometrial cancer after treatment for 6 months with a hormonal intrauterine device, in a phase II study reported during the virtual edition of the Society of Gynecologic Oncology (SGO)...
The invited discussant of EMPOWER-Cervical 1 was Mansoor Raza Mirza, MD, Chief Oncologist at Copenhagen University Hospital and Chairman of the European Network of Gynaecological Oncology Trials group (ENGOT). Dr. Mirza called the findings “amazing” and predicted they will “usher in a new era” in...
In the 5-year follow-up of the pivotal SOLO-1 trial in women with newly diagnosed advanced ovarian cancer and a BRCA1/2 mutation, maintenance treatment with olaparib led to a more than doubling in progression-free survival, according to a presentation at the Society of Gynecologic Oncology (SGO)...
Perspectives on ARIEL4 were provided for The ASCO Post by the invited discussant Ursula A. Matulonis, MD, Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and Chief of Gynecologic Oncology and the Brock Wilson Family Chair at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, and Konstantin Zakashansky, MD,...
Comments on the OUTBACK trial were provided by invited discussant Kunle Odunsi, MD, PhD, Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Dean for Oncology, and Director of the University of Chicago Medicine Comprehensive Cancer Center. Lilian T. Gien, MD, MSc, Associate Professor of Oncology at the...
In women with locally advanced cervical cancer, adjuvant chemotherapy adds no benefit to standard cisplatin-based chemoradiation, results of the international phase III OUTBACK study have shown,1 as reported at the 2021 ASCO Annual Meeting by Linda R. Mileshkin, MD, Professor of Medical Oncology at ...
Mark G. Kris, MD, FASCO, Chief of the Thoracic Oncology Service and the William and Joy Ruane Chair in Thoracic Oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, commented on the excitement in the field of lung cancer about the new drugs targeting KRAS. Sotorasib is one of several new...
The KRAS-specific inhibitor sotorasib achieved responses in patients with KRAS G12C–mutated non–small lung cancer (NSCLC) who had experienced disease progression on platinum-based chemotherapy, immunotherapy, or both treatments. The objective response rate was 37.1%, and responses extended to all...
Atezolizumab given after chemotherapy to patients with resected stage II to IIIA non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) significantly improved disease-free survival compared with best supportive care alone in patients whose tumors expressed PD-L1.1 These results of the global phase III IMpower010 trial ...
In patients with triple-negative breast cancer who have residual disease after neoadjuvant chemotherapy, adjuvant capecitabine remains the standard of care. In the multicenter randomized noninferiority EA1131 trial, which included primarily basal tumors, noninferiority of adjuvant platinum over...